From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul  1 10:11:03 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:11:03 -0700
Subject: [News] Confrontations in Puerto Rico
Message-ID: <mailman.99.1277993605.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>




IMPORTANT NEWS TO DIVULGE TROUGHOUT THE WORLD.
EXPLOSIVE POLITICAL SITUATION IN PUERTO RICO

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, 
groups of students, teachers and citizens asked 
for entry to the House of the Laws and they were 
struck and tortured by the Police, there are 
numerous injured people, while the National Guard 
is mobilized towards the Capitol Hill. Violent 
shocks scatter for the whole zone of the 
Parliament and the repressions continue.

A constitutional coup has just been established in Puerto Rico.
After a year in which the present time government 
under the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo 
Progresista, that attempts to join the Island to 
the United States trough statehood) tried to and 
succeeded taking over many institutions that form 
the base of the democratic government of Puerto 
Rico, an atmosphere of hostility followed by many 
reckless actions that threaten public peace had 
climaxed in violent and aggressive actions of 
this government against the parties of the 
opposition, the organized student movement, the 
labor unions, the press, the environment, as 
against every area and institution of Puerto Rico?s civil society.

This constitutional coup springs from the 
Legislative branch of the government under the 
command of Senator Thomas Rivera Schatz, endorsed 
by the central government, under the dominance of 
the Secretary Governor, counselor Marcos 
Rodr?guez Ema, with the obvious intent of having 
under their grasp and without opposition full 
control of every agency and organization that 
rule the judiciary, academic, economic and civil 
societies. Before this scenario, Governor Luis 
Fortu?o operates without volition, has no 
opinion, appearance nor public responsibility.

With the complete control of the High Court of 
Puerto Rico, the University of Puerto Rico Board 
of trustees, and the alleged control of the news 
media, among many others, the genuine 
participation of the People of Puerto Rico in all 
democratic processes protected by our Constitution is jeopardized.

The events started (trough the rush approval of 
Law 7 by the Legislature) with more than 20,000 
public employee lay-offs, with the allegation 
that this would alleviate the gigantism of the 
government and would find the solution of the 
serious public deficit, that has never been 
properly evidenced. This decision has caused 
economical chaos, public services are worse than 
ever and it has generated despair and gloominess 
in every Puertorrican family. In this same guise 
there exists a serious persecution against all 
artistic institutions of the country, strangling 
their budgets, trying with this actions to avoid 
the propagation of art as dissidence. This, while 
the government favors contracts of obscene sums 
with hundreds of advisors, contractors and 
lobbyists associated with their own political party.

The attacks continued in the form of the 
appointment to the High Court of four Judges with 
a well known affiliation with, and militancy for 
the governing political party, achieving a 
majority of votes in favor of the actual 
government on all decisions made in this Forum, 
on individual basis. The government went on 
repressing and eliminating student participation 
on the procedures of the State University, 
suppressing tuition exemption rights for 
outstanding athletes and artists, among others; 
forcing the students from all eleven campuses of 
the University of Puerto Rico to declare a strike 
that lasted 60 days, generating ample support 
from the people of Puerto Rico and around the world.

The students on strike were successful on their 
achieving their demands trough negotiations that 
involved a First Instance Court and an appointed 
negotiator; however, these accords were are 
trying to be invalidated by Secretary of 
government Rodr?guez Ema who said that these 
accords ?are not worth the paper in which they were written?

This event preceded the Central government?s 
action of proposing a hasty law, that was signed 
with no revision within hours, adding four 
additional members to the Board of trustees of 
the University of Puerto Rico. These additions to 
the Board are unconditional members of the 
governing political party The students of the 
State university, who on a great majority depend 
in Federal grants, now face an annual recurring 
fee of $800.00, fee they will not be able to pay 
and that they will not pay, forcing the students 
to return to their strike. With this strategy, 
the Central government risk the accreditation of 
the State University and as a consequence, the 
government would be able to privatize it?s assets.

Following this same direction, the government of 
Puerto Rico will attempt to sell and to divide 
for speculation a strip of land where stands the 
Karst formation, on the northwest of the Island. 
This area collects one third of our water 
supplies for the entire population; nonetheless, 
the government intends to put this area into 
private hands that would build a toll expressway 
over this zone that is rich ecologically and economically.

Passing up many other events, the budget of 
Puerto Rico was approved, together with countless 
laws which favor privatization, the dissolving of 
professional associations and the distribution of 
public funds into private hands, without the 
pertaining and compulsory hearings of public 
participation, reaching the extreme of turning 
off the microphones of the opposing political 
party members, in a despotic fashion.

The events climaxed last week when the FBI in 
Puerto Rico arrested Senator H?ctor Mart?nez, 
NPP, on charges of bribe, the selling of 
influences and other charges. Martinez is 
Senator?s Rivera Schatz right hand on the Senate. 
A public squabble reached the news between the 
Senator and the FBI, with the Seantor fending the 
alleged innocence of Senator Mart?nez,, who has 
been directly associated with drug traffic and 
who was filmed while committing bribery.

Then, last in his many violent and reckless acts, 
the president of the Senate, Rivera Schatz, using 
force and a real padlock, censored the access of 
the cameras and the news media to the Senate 
sessions, depriving the People of Puerto Rico of 
direct information about the discussions and 
voting sessions that were taking place about this 
year?s budget and other matter). The events 
resulted in verbal and physical violence between 
senators, rising indignation between the people 
to a point of and almost unsustainable state of outrage and wrath.

Counselor Rivera Schatz has taken virtual control 
of the country with his tyrannical and fascist 
ways; and it cannot be discarded that from these 
same seats, this same week, acts of persecution 
and acts of violence will be started against 
other sectors of the People, all approved by the 
Secretary Governor of Puerto Rico.

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, 
groups of students, teachers and citizens asked 
for entry to the House of the Laws and they were 
struck and tortured by the Police, there are 
numerous injured people, while the National Guard 
is mobilized towards the Capitol Hill. Violent 
shocks scatter for the whole zone of the 
Parliament and the repressions continue.

This factual deed of control of the political 
power from within the Puertorrican Nation 
violates all elementary principles of democracy 
and of participation of the People in the 
government, for which we proclaim to the World 
the actual situation of contained violence that 
exists in our People and that is about to explode 
against these two politicians that had taken by 
assault the power in our Country. Even though in 
Puerto Rico there are no conditions for an armed 
struggle of the People because of the obvious 
disparity of the opposing sides, a revolution of 
cultural and of student affirmation is starting 
to take the streets and to retrieve the spaces 
stolen away by the originators of this coup.

We exhortat all communications media of the World 
to divulge and expose the current situation of 
the Puertorrican Nation and we ask of you, therefore, your total solidarity.

Composed by Roberto Ramos-Perea, Puertorrican Playwriter
(With the active collaboration, comments and 
support of more than a hundred Puertorrican citizens.)



Luis Barrios, Ph.D., BCFE
Chair & Professor
Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies
Joh Jay College of Criminal Justice-City University of New York
445 West 59 Street, Room 4115-N
New York, New York 10019
Office: (212) 237-8747
FAX: (212) 237-8664
Email: lbarrios at jjay.cuny.edu
Web Page: www.jjay.cuny.edu

Para m? ser comunista no es militar en un 
partido; para m? ser comunista es tener una 
actitud ante la vida. Hayd?e Santamar?a

I believe that there will ultimately be a clash 
between the oppressed and those that do the 
oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash 
between those who want freedom, justice and 
equality for everyone and those who want to 
continue the systems of exploitation. Malcolm X

Education either functions as an instrument which 
is used to facilitate integration of the younger 
generation into the logic of the present system 
and bring about conformity or it becomes the 
practice of freedom, the means by which men and 
women deal critically and creatively with reality 
and discover how to participate in the 
transformation of their world. Paulo Freire


From: <mailto:lbarrios at jjay.cuny.edu>Luis Barrios
To: virtin red informativa internacional

URGENTE. URGENTE. URGENTE.
PARA DIFUSI?N INMEDIATA.
NOTICIA PARA EL MUNDO.

LA EXPLOSIVA SITUACI?N POL?TICA
  DE PUERTO RICO

Son las 5:00 de la tarde del d?a 30 de junio de 
2010, grupos de estudiantes, profesores y 
ciudadanos pidieron entrada a la Casa de las 
Leyes y fueron golpeados y torturados por la 
Pol?cia, hay numerosos heridos, mientras se 
moviliza la Guardia Nacional hacia el Capitolio. 
Choques violentos se esparcen por toda la zona 
del Parlamento y las represiones contin?an.

Un golpe de estado constitucional acaba de consolidarse en Puerto Rico.
Tras un a?o de que el actual gobierno del Partido 
Nuevo Progresista (PNP, partido que busca la 
anexi?n de Puerto Rico a los Estados Unidos), 
intentara y lograra exitosamente la toma de 
varias instituciones que sostienen el gobierno 
democr?tico de Puerto Rico, un ambiente de 
hostilidad seguido por temerarias acciones 
retadoras de la paz p?blica, han desembocado en 
acciones violentas y agresivas del actual 
gobierno, tanto contra los partidos de oposici?n, 
como del movimiento estudiantil organizado, los 
sindicatos, la prensa, as? como de todos los 
sectores de la sociedad civil puertorrique?a.
Esta toma del control constitucional procede de 
la Rama Legislativa bajo la autoridad del Senador 
Lcdo.Thomas Rivera Schatz, apoyada por el 
gobierno central bajo el mando del Secretario de 
la Gobernaci?n, el Lcdo. Marcos Rodr?guez Ema, 
con el obvio prop?sito de tener a su disposici?n 
y sin disputa, el control de todos los organismos 
rectores judiciales, universitarios, econ?micos y 
civiles. Ante este panorama, el actual 
Gobernador, Lcdo. Luis Fortu?o, funciona sin 
voluntad, sin opini?n y sin presencia ni responsabilidad p?blica.
Con el control del Tribunal Supremo de Puerto 
Rico, la Junta de S?ndicos de la Universidad de 
Puerto Rico, el pretendido control de los medios 
de comunicaci?n, entre muchos otros, se atenta 
contra la genuina participaci?n del pueblo 
puertorrique?o en todos los procesos democr?ticos 
protegidos por su Carta de Derechos.
Los incidentes comenzaron con el despido de m?s 
20,000 empleados p?blicos con el pretexto de 
aliviar el gigantismo gubernamental y resolver el 
grav?simo d?ficit fiscal del pa?s. Esta decisi?n 
ha provocado el caos econ?mico, ha empeorado la 
prestaci?n de servicios p?blicos y ha provocado 
la desesperanza en todas las familias 
puertorrique?as. De la misma forma se instaur? 
una grave persecuci?n contra los institutos 
art?sticos del pa?s, estrangulando sus 
presupuestos y de esta manera evitar la 
propagaci?n del arte como disidencia. Mientras el 
Gobierno favorec?a con contratos de cantidades 
obscenas, a cientos de asesores, contratistas, y 
cabilderos asociados a su partido.
Continuaron los ataques con el nombramiento al 
Tribunal Supremo de cuatro Jueces afiliados y 
militantes al partido del poder logrando con ello 
la mayor?a a favor del gobierno de todas las 
decisiones que por votaci?n individual se 
hicieran en ese foro. Luego continu? con la 
eliminaci?n y represi?n de la participaci?n 
estudiantil en los procesos universitarios, la 
supresi?n de derechos de exenci?n de matricula de 
atletas, artistas, entre otros, mientras oblig? a 
los estudiantes de los 11 recintos universitarios 
del estado a declarar una Huelga que dur? 60 
d?as. Los estudiantes en Huelga lograron negociar 
a trav?s de un tribunal de primera instancia, sin 
embargo, los referidos compromisos fueron 
invalidados por el Secretario de la Gobernaci?n 
quien dijo que los acuerdos ?no valen el papel en que est?n escritos?.
Este hecho precedi? a la acci?n del gobierno 
central y del Senado de proponer un proyecto de 
Ley, aprobado en cuesti?n de horas, para aumentar 
cuatro miembros m?s a la Junta de S?ndicos. 
Dichos miembros son incondicionales del partido 
en el poder. Los estudiantes universitarios de la 
universidad del estado, cuya vasta mayor?a 
dependen de la beca de estudios federal, se 
enfrentan a una cuota anual recurrente de $800 
d?lares. Cuota que no pueden pagar y que se 
negar?n a pagar obligados nuevamente a la 
consecuente Huelga. De esta manera, la 
administraci?n central de la UPR arriesga la 
acreditaci?n de la Universidad y podr? privatizar 
sus activos. En esta misma direcci?n, el Gobierno 
de Puerto Rico vender? los terrenos donde se 
ubica la zona del llamado ?Karso? del Noroeste, 
que recoge un tercio de los abastos de agua de 
todo el pa?s, para entregarlo a manos privadas 
que construir?n un expreso de peaje sobre la 
referida zona, rica ecol?gicamente.
Pasando por alto muchos otros acontecimientos, el 
Presupuesto del pa?s fue aprobado, junto con 
innumerables leyes que favorecen la 
privatizaci?n, la descolegiaci?n profesional, as? 
como la repartici?n de fondos p?blicos a manos 
privadas sin tomar en cuenta las necesarias y 
obligadas vistas p?blicas de participaci?n 
ciudadana, y apagando los micr?fonos de las 
bancas del Partido de Oposici?n de manera desp?tica.
Los incidentes lograron un punto clim?tico cuando 
esta pasada semana, el FBI (Federal Bureau of 
Investigation de los Estados Unidos) arresta por 
cargos de soborno, venta de influencias y otros a 
un senador del PNP, el senador H?ctor Mart?nez, 
mano derecha del Senador Rivera Schatz. Una pugna 
p?blica salta a las noticias entre Rivera Schatz 
y este cuerpo federal castrense, en defensa de la 
supuesta inocencia del senador Mart?nez, quien ha 
sido asociado al narcotr?fico y quien fuera 
grabado en medio de su acto de soborno. Como 
?ltimo de los muchos incidentes de violencia y 
temeridad del Presidente Senatorial, se censur? 
mediante la fuerza la entrada de los periodistas 
a las sesiones del Senado, privando al pueblo 
puertorrique?o de la discusi?n que se realiz? 
sobre el presupuesto del pa?s. Los incidentes 
llegaron a la violencia verbal y f?sica entre 
senadores, y han elevado la indignaci?n del pa?s 
a un punto insostenible de ansiedad y rabia.
El Lcdo. Thomas Rivera Schatz ha tomado virtual 
control del pa?s con sus actitudes tir?nicas y 
fascistas, y no se descarta que desde sus mismas 
gradas se inicien esta semana procesos de 
persecuci?n y violencia contra otros sectores del 
pa?s, apoyados por el Secretario de la Gobernaci?n de Puerto Rico.
Son las 5:00 de la tarde del d?a 30 de junio de 
2010, grupos de estudiantes, profesores y 
ciudadanos pidieron entrada a la Casa de las 
Leyes y fueron golpeados y torturados por la 
Pol?cia, hay numerosos heridos, mientras se 
moviliza la Guardia Nacional hacia el Capitolio. 
Choques violentos se esparcen por toda la zona 
del Parlamento y las represiones contin?an.
Este control de facto del poder pol?tico en la 
Naci?n Puertorrique?a viola todos los m?s 
elementales principios de la democracia y del 
gobierno participativo, por lo que enteramos al 
mundo de la actual situaci?n de violencia 
contenida que existe en nuestro pueblo y que est? 
a punto de estallar contra estos dos pol?ticos 
que han tomado por asalto el poder del pa?s. A?n 
cuando en Puerto Rico no existen las condiciones 
para un levantamiento armado popular por la obvia 
desigualdad de las fuerzas en pugna, una 
revoluci?n de afirmaci?n cultural y estudiantil 
comienza a tomar las calles y a rescatar los 
espacios robados por los autores de este golpe.
Exhortamos a todos los medios de comunicaci?n del 
mundo a que den noticia de la actual situaci?n de 
la Naci?n Puertorrique?a y solicitamos por ende su completa solidaridad.

Redactado por Roberto Ramos-Perea, dramaturgo puertorrique?o.
(Con la activa colaboraci?n, comentarios y apoyo 
de m?s de un centenar de ciudadanos puertorrique?os.)





Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul  1 10:30:07 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:30:07 -0700
Subject: [News] The anatomy of an attack on Iran
Message-ID: <mailman.104.1277994609.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


[]

Middle East
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html
Jul 1, 2010

The anatomy of an attack on Iran
By David Moon

In mid-June, Hugh Tomlinson in the Times of London wrote that the 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>government 
of Saudi Arabia conferred on Israel the "green light" for use of its 
airspace for an attack on Iran. This revelation was said to be 
conventional wisdom inside the Saudi military. Tomlinson also quoted 
an unnamed United States military source stating to the effect that 
the US Department of State and the Defense Department had both said 
"grace" over this arrangement.
The Saudis and Israelis immediately denied the report, while US 
officials made no specific comments on the subject. The silence and 
denials nixed further media speculation.

First reported in the Times of London in July 2009 and referred to 
again in Tomlinson's recent article is word of a supposed meeting 
between Israel's Mossad chief Meir Dagan and unnamed Saudi 
intelligence leaders to discuss such an arrangement that both 
governments denied then and now.

Given the apparent regional political status quo, how might the 
Israeli Air Force (IAF) strike Iran undetected on approach and at the 
very least unacknowledged on return if the decision is made in 
Jerusalem that the existential threat posed by Iran's arc of nuclear 
progress can no longer safely be tolerated?

Although the coordination of logistics and tactics of such a long 
distance mission - 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) on the straight 
line from Tel Aviv to Iran's uranium enrichment facility in Natanz - 
is daunting, the strategic or political realities must be defined 
before all else.

Overflight of Iraq on a direct bearing to Iran is out of the 
question. Such a path would cause friction between the US, 
responsible for Iraq's aerial sovereignty, and the next Iraqi 
government sure to be of delicate composition. It's safe to assume 
that the US views stability in Iraq far higher on the national 
interest meter than say apartments in east Jerusalem, thus for Israel 
the straight line over Iraq comes at a price that it can ill afford to pay.

The likely route to Iran, beginning at regional dusk preferably in 
the dark a new moon, is to fly a great circle around Iraq. Only 
careful planning carried out with precision timing and execution will 
ensure success. For this route, almost every applicable IAF logistics 
and support asset would be utilized.

The first leg for any F-15I and F-16I fighter bombers is a low-level 
run up the Mediterranean in the area of the Syrian town of Latakin, 
where up to three KC-707s (aerial tankers) in race track orbit would 
top up the tanks of the strike group. This tankage is absolutely 
necessary for the shorter-legged F-16I (range 1,300 miles). Refueling 
the F-15I (range 2765 miles) is desirable but not a necessity unless 
intelligence suggests targets beyond eastern Iran.

To skirt Turkish airspace and the ability of the Turkish military to 
raise an alarm heard throughout the North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization (NATO), the strike group with two pairs of Gulfstream 
G-550s: one of each outfitted as a network-centric collaborative 
targeting (NCCT) and one each employing Senior Suter technology must 
fly low across northern Syria. The G-550 is a small package with the 
range the speed to accompany the strike group 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>round trip 
without refueling - therefore up to the challenge.

The NCCT 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>aircraft 
ferrets out air defense radars. The Suter partner beams a data stream 
containing, what in computer parlance is called a "worm", into air 
defense radars with the capability of incapacitating an entire air 
defense network, if such a network is under centralized control.

This technology pioneered by the US Air Force and part of the code 
named the "Big Safari" program is heady stuff said to work wonders 
over Syria during the IAF's strike on Syria's North Korean-designed 
nuclear reactor in September 2007. The support of the G-550s will be 
instrumental every mile of the mission.

Non-networked anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) in states hostile to 
Israel may necessitate F-16Is in the tried and true AGM-88 high speed 
anti-radiation missile (HARM) mission.

Yet another application of high technology was the launch on June 11, 
2007, of Ofek-7, as noted by Richard B Gasparre, also a source on 
G-550s in IAF service at airforce-technology.com, is a "... 
reconnaissance satellite, which gives Israeli intelligence 
specialists site and system mapping capability of unprecedented 
accuracy". Ofek-7 undoubtedly contributed to strike planning for the 
IAF's mission to Syria.

These powerful tools will be counted on to enable the strike package 
to skirt either Turkish or Iraqi airspace for a short jump of 150 or 
so miles to reach Iranian airspace undetected. The distance on a 
straight line from Latakin to Tabriz in Iran is 618 miles. The 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>flight is 
shorter if the Israelis avoid Turkey and cut the Kurdish corner.

At a designated point over northern Iran, the strike group splits 
into Q and E-flights. Q-Flight flies southeast 348 miles to reach the 
known uranium-enrichment sites in Qom (under construction) and Natanz 
(operational). E-Flight homes in on the gas storage development site 
at Esfahan and the heavy water reactor complex at Arak on a more 
southerly path of 481 miles.

All the while in Iranian airspace, the G-550 Suter and NCCT aircraft 
work in tandem and with F-16I aircraft to suppress radars and AAA, 
while F-15Is designated top cover guard against any air-to-air threat 
put up by Iran's air force.

The strike package can count on aid in the form of Popeye Turbo 
cruise missiles launched by at least one Israeli submarine from the 
Arabian Sea against targets in Iran designed to shield the Israeli 
planes, degrade enemy responses and sow confusion among the Iranian military.

At some point, one of the three US Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint ELINT 
(electronic intelligence) platforms in the area will "see" Iranian 
air defense radars and hear an explosion of Iranian voices on open 
airwaves and quickly piece together events in Iran. This collected 
product will be immediately passed through Central Command to 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>Washington 
for dissemination to the principles of the National Security Council, 
including US President Barack Obama.
Seven hours earlier, at least three IAF KC-707s would have flown the 
3,500 miles around the Arabian Peninsula, likely painted up like 
commercial 707 cargo aircraft, transiting international airspace to a 
meeting point over the northern Persian Gulf. At this extreme range, 
each KC-707 carries only an estimated 85,000 lbs of fuel to pass to 
the hungry F-16Is flying 451 miles from Qom and 350 miles from Esfahan.

Each F-16I will require at least 5,000 lbs of jet fuel for the final 
leg of nearly 1,000 miles through northern Saudi Arabia then home. 
Thus, a hinge point in IAF planning; the Israelis must determine the 
mix of F-16Is and KC-707s committed to the mission.

On and over the Persian Gulf, given the presence of US Navy and Air 
Force AWACS platforms such as the EC-2 Hawkeye and E-3 Sentry along 
with SPY-1 radars of US Navy cruisers and destroyers, the Israelis 
can have no expectation at all that the refueling scrum of the F-16Is 
will go undetected. During this evolution, any IAF planes too damaged 
to make it home can ditch close to a US Navy ship with a reasonable 
expectation of rescue.

Much will depend on what the US does with the information in hand. 
Does Obama choose to inform Iraqi and Gulf Cooperation Council allies 
of the situation, or will various US radars simply go into 
"diagnostic mode", as if operators cannot believe what they see?

If Obama's decision is to watch and listen, the strike group can try 
a run for home across northern Saudi Arabia. Here, the Saudis have a 
decision. The Saudi Air Force can defend the kingdom's airspace, 
possibly taking loses and handing out same, or the Israelis can bet 
on G-550s tricking out the kingdom's air defenses in a manner that 
gives the Saudis an excuse to say they were blinded by the IAF and 
the non-cooperation of the US.

By flying north, the IAF reaps the benefits of plausible deniability, 
a political necessity for US and allied Arab states. These states can 
honestly say they had no prior knowledge of IAF planes winging it to 
Iran with full racks of missiles and bombs.

Another option is available to the Israelis to increase the IAF's 
odds of flying the northern leg undetected. This choice is to strike 
the "Duchy of Nasrallah" - Hezbollah under Hassan Nasrallah in 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>Lebanon - to 
create cover and sow confusion. If the IAF is to strike Iran, 
immediate blowback is to be expected from Iran-supported Hezbollah's 
extensive inventory of unguided missiles.

On June 18, the 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>aircraft 
carrier USS Harry S Truman and task group including the German 
frigate Hessen in the company of an unidentified Israeli naval vessel 
made a fast transit of the Suez Canal. The Egyptians not only closed 
the canal to all traffic, all fishing boats where docked, while the 
Egyptian military lined the banks of the canal. All facets of this 
passage rank as extraordinary.

It is readily apparent that the US Department of State and the 
Pentagon collaborated closely with an Arab country to create a lane 
of fast transit not only for US Navy assets and an attached NATO 
ally, but for an Israeli ship.

One more element, the IDF launched their improved Ofek-9 
reconnaissance satellite on June 22. Is this a matter of timing or of 
coincidence?

Tensions are high in the region, yet little could precipitate a full 
diplomatic meltdown quicker than for Iran to directly challenge 
Israel's blockade of Gaza. And this confrontation is in no way 
limited to Israel and Iran. Such a provocation could easily inflame 
public opinion in Sunni Arab states, where leaders are weary of 
Tehran's grandstanding on the question of Israel. Tehran's rhetoric 
of threats toward Israel politically undermines Arab governments seen 
as less fervent on the subject.

CNN reported on June 24 on Iran's canceled designs to directly test 
the Gaza blockade. Hossein Sheikholeslam, secretary general of the 
International Conference for the Support of the Palestinian Intifada, 
said, "In order not to give the Zionist regime an excuse, we will 
send the aid through other routes and without Iran's name."

Sheiholeslam's comment makes little sense, as the point of Iran's aid 
exercise was to win the propaganda war against Israel and Arab 
states. Whatever Iran's "excuse", there is reason now to suspect the 
Tehran regime will back down if decisively confronted by a motivated 
and unified coalition of area states.

David Moon is a regular contributor from the United States. He can be 
contacted at <mailto:uscontributor at aol.com>uscontributor at aol.com.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul  1 13:51:11 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:51:11 -0700
Subject: [News] Video links to police assault in Puerto Rico
Message-ID: <mailman.120.1278006676.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


Here are some links to videos of yesterday afternoon's police assault 
on the Puerto Rican public this afternoon, for the "crime" of seeking 
access to the legislature as it debated the budget for the next 
fiscal year. Even if you don't understand Spanish, you'll get the drift...


<http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/primeraplana/motin-en-el-capitolio/20100630224736>http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/primeraplana/motin-en-el-capitolio/20100630224736

http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/flash_news/las-fuerzas-estaban-listas-para-enfrentarse/20100630225322

<http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/flash_news/mas-escenas-del-motin-en-el-capitolio/20100630191331>http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/flash_news/mas-escenas-del-motin-en-el-capitolio/20100630191331

http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/flash_news/reacciona-el-superintendente/20100630191454

<http://www.primerahora.com/videosdelmotinenelcapitolio-397282.html>http://www.primerahora.com/videosdelmotinenelcapitolio-397282.html



Jan Susler
People's Law Office
1180 N. Milwaukee
Chicago, IL 60642
773/235-0070 x 118
jsusler at aol.com



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  2 10:40:33 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:40:33 -0700
Subject: [News] Maradona: the anti-imperialist perfect ten
Message-ID: <mailman.134.1278081802.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Maradona: the anti-imperialist perfect ten



July 1, 2010

http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/maradona-the-anti-imperialist-perfect-ten/


Jos? Steinsleger ? La Jornada

Translation: Machetera for Tlaxcala

In journalism schools, when young people learn 
about the concept of ?news,? their teachers 
resort to a classic example: news is when a 
person bites a dog, not the other way round.  But 
just this past March in Buenos Aires, Diego 
Maradona?s dog bit his upper lip, and the news flew round the world.

The star was rushed to emergency surgery 
(stitches and facial surgery) and experts on the 
subject turned their attention to the grotesque 
Bella, a costly example of the Chinese Shar Pei 
species.  With serene, balanced, affable 
characters, Shar Pei can react unpredictably if 
one looks them in the eye, face to face.

Whatever he says, or doesn?t say, does or doesn?t 
do, Maradona is always news.  And leaders like 
Fidel Castro, Hugo Ch?vez, Evo Morales, N?stor 
Kirchner or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad understand that 
the star?s political messages move the 
consciousness of the poor and exploited on five continents.

With some disdain, the elite on the left and 
right agree: he is a diva, alienated, crazy, 
demagogue, opportunist, degenerate, media 
phenomenon, cocaine-addict, populist, 
myth
myth?  A myth, I believe, is the sublimation 
of intellectually inflated references and 
abstract imagined theories to avoid practical 
adherence to the real and concrete.

 From poverty, to soccer and fame, from the abyss 
of cocaine and treatment in Cuba for his 
addiction, the best player of the twentieth 
century according to FIFA (53.6 percent of those 
polled) has proven himself to be a generous and 
grateful man.  In 2000, he donated the royalties 
from his biography ?I am Diego? to the people of 
Cuba and to Fidel, and ever since, he has carried 
a tattoo of Che on his right arm and one of the Comandante on his left calf.

Liberals can?t stand Maradona.  Is it because his 
speeches barely trouble the powerful?  In 
contrast, the right wing mob and parrots of world 
power are alarmed to hear his statements in favor 
of player unionization (the soccer workers, he 
says), and the eventual impact that this would 
have on the businesses in this industry that move 
billions in cash every second.

In clear, fierce, confrontational struggle, 
Maradona has leaned on his untouchable fame in 
order to liberate, upward and to the right, 
ideals that correspond politically to those below 
and to the left.  And alas, here lies the real 
substance of his differences with Pel?, the Uncle 
Tom of global capitalist soccer.

In November of 2005, motivated by the historical 
presidential summit in Mar del Plata (where the 
free trade project for the Americas, ALCA, was 
buried), the people closely followed Maradona?s 
thinking.  Before boarding the so-called ALBA 
train (the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian 
Alliance for the People of Our America), that 
left from Buenos Aires for Mar del Plata along 
with then presidential candidate Evo Morales, the 
musician Manu Chao, and the Serbian film director 
Emir Kusturica, Diego told the media: ?I ask 
Argentineans to understand that we are heading 
for dignity, to defend what is ours
It?s a matter 
of pride to be on this train in order to 
repudiate the trash that is Bush
If I had him 
under the goal, I?d tear his head off with a well 
placed ball.?  It was a statement of faith that 
the obsessed Boca Juniors fans accompanied with 
bands of street musicians and bass drums.

In December of 2007, after a game with Brazil, 
Maradona was in the locker room where he met 
Iran?s charge d?affaires, and expressed his 
admiration for President Ahmadinejad.  ?I?ve 
already met Ch?vez and Fidel.  Now I want to get 
to know your president
I?m with the Iranians from 
the bottom of my heart, honestly I say: I?m with the people of Iran.?

Kusturica presented the documentary Maradona at 
the Cannes film festival in 2008, and spared no 
praise toward someone who is seen as a god by his 
followers.  He observed: ?He creates magical 
moments.  If we were to compare soccer?s 
popularity in imperial Roman terms, he'd be 
qualified to be a god.?  Which led El Diez 
[Number Ten] to hurriedly respond that he didn?t 
feel like a god, ?but if the people consider me 
one, I?m not going to contradict them.?  Maradona 
has altars in his honor in Naples, and after the 
God-granted goal against England (M?xico, 1986), 
the Scottish Tartan Army team included him in 
their anthem.  And in Rosario (birthplace of Che 
and Messi), fans founded the Church of Maradona 
in 2003, its era beginning in 1960, the year El Diez was born.

Maradona?s political convictions and faith are 
something to watched.  Once, after hearing the 
Pope and seeing the golden ceilings in St. 
Peter?s Basilica, his voice echoed down the 
hallways of the Vatican: ?The church ? according 
to the press ? assures us that it is worried 
about poor kids.  So: sell the ceilings, man!  Do something!?

Understanding something about destiny, the 
technical director of the Argentinean team dealt 
calmly with Bella?s bite.  And upon seeing that 
he'd been lodged in Room 606 at the Los Arcos* 
hospital, he took it as a sign of good luck.  Or 
is there anyone alive who doesn?t know that for 
Chinese gamblers, the number 6 stands for a dog, 
in the interpretation of dreams?

*Translator?s note: the Spanish word for a soccer goal is ?arco.?




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  2 10:56:21 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:56:21 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?India_-_Who_are_India=92s_Maoists=2C_and_Wh?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?at__Do_They_Want=3F?=
Message-ID: <mailman.139.1278082773.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



<http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/who-are-indias-maoists-and-what-do-they-want/>Who 
are India?s Maoists, and What Do They Want?

<http://revolutionaryfrontlines.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/india-maoists-patchwork-corridor.jpg>
[]



Rita Khanna
http://radicalnotes.com/journal/2009/11/19/war-against-the-maoists-but-who-are-they-and-what-do-they-want/

This is meant to be a simple and brief exposition 
of the goals and strategies of the Maoist 
movement in India for people who may not have 
much awareness about it and are confused by the 
propaganda in the mainstream media. This does not 
go into the arcane debates about mode of 
production in India, the debates among communist 
revolutionaries over strategy and tactics etc. 
This aims at people who, for example, are 
perplexed why the Maoists, instead of trying to 
ensure safe drinking water like an NGO, rather, 
often resort to violent activities against the Government.

The Indian government is launching a full-scale 
war against the Maoist rebels and the people led 
by them in different parts of the country. The 
initial battles, without any formal announcement, 
have already started. For this purpose, they 
intend to deploy about 75,000 security personnel 
[the current figure is over 200,000] in parts of 
Central and Eastern India, including 
Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand. The 
government will organize its regular air-force in 
addition to paramilitary and specially trained 
COBRA forces. The air-force has begun to extend its logistic support.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister 
P. Chidambaram have declared the Maoist rebels to 
be ?the biggest internal security threat? to 
India and a hindrance to ?development?. The 
mainstream media seem to have taken them at their 
face value. Their publications and television 
programmes seem to be building a war-hysteria 
against the Maoist rebels regardless of the fact 
that this attack by the government will be 
directed against some of the most deprived of the 
Indian people. Indeed this is turning into a war 
of the state against its own people!

While paying lip service at times to the notion 
that the current people?s insurgency led by the 
Maoist rebels has its root in decades of vicious 
exploitation of the poor, especially the dalits 
and tribals, the blare of government propaganda 
tries to convince us that the Maoist rebels are 
dangerous, blood-thirsty terrorists determined to 
establish their areas of influence. The 
Government is preaching that the Maoists can go 
to any extent to maintain their influence in 
these areas ? by either preventing the government 
from undertaking development activities or using 
the power of their guns, killing disobedient 
individuals. Their ideology is to terrorise the 
common people, wrest power from the 
democratically elected governments and destroy 
the entire fabric of the society.

The government and the media want us to believe 
that the only people, apart from a few romantic 
misguided intellectuals, who willingly support 
Maoists are the poor, ignorant, uneducated, 
uninformed tribal people. They seem to claim that 
no sensible, intelligent person living in a 
society like ours would support them voluntarily. But is this a true picture?

Could it be that the Maoist rebels are supporting 
and organizing the poor, exploited people to 
fight oppression, to establish a more egalitarian 
society where the wealth of our growing economy 
will be spread among all, not merely among a very 
small minority? Could it be that in the name of 
suppressing the Maoists, the state is going all 
out to break the backbone of these poor peoples? 
fight? Could it be that the government is 
planning to wage a war, in our name, against our 
own sisters and brothers to help line the pockets of the rich?

In this hour of crisis, we must ask those 
questions that the government seeks to suppress.

What do we really know about the Maoist rebels, 
their ideology, their plans and programs? Why 
does the government need to go to war against its 
own people and inside its own territory? Are the 
Maoists really blocking development? Who are 
these Maoists anyway and what do they want?

Let us take one question at a time.

Who are these Maoists?

The Maoists are revolutionaries mainly consisting 
of the extremely poor people including a large 
number of dalits and tribals. They come mainly 
from the toiling masses of India and they are 
trying to organize the vast population of such 
masses of this country. They seek to arm and 
train them so that these masses can resist the 
onslaught of the rich. In this effort they go 
beyond the idea that mass movements should focus 
on some specific issues like increase of wages, 
better health care, more honesty of public servants and so forth.

The view of the Maoist rebels is that the poor 
and exploited people must first and foremost 
establish their own democratic political power 
and their own state power in various places. This 
is because without controlling state power, the 
poor and the exploited can at most hope for only 
limited improvements in their living conditions, 
i.e., so long as it does not inconvenience the 
rich who usually control the state power. So, the 
Maoists mobilize the poor to fight against the 
existing state, even armed fight if possible, as 
they consider the existing state to be a set of 
agents acting for the big multinational 
corporations, rich landlords and the wealthy in general.

The fight is an extremely challenging and unequal 
one as the rich are aided by the government 
bureaucrats, the police and even the military. 
Also, contrary to what the Government and the 
mainstream media are propagating, the Maoist 
rebels are actually completely opposed to 
individual killings, they openly denigrate such 
stray terrorism-like acts. What they have been 
attempting to build up is a mass movement, even 
armed, to take on the violence of the ruling 
classes and its representative state machinery.

The Maoist movement was born in India in the late 
1960s, after a radical section of political 
workers broke away mainly from the Communist 
Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) because they felt 
the CPIM and other such parties like CPI, RSP, 
etc. had discredited themselves with their 
opportunist politics of placating and 
compromising with the rich. The movement has a 
long history of development. The present party, 
CPI (Maoist), came into being in 2004 by the 
merger of a number of fraternal organizations.

Is development in India arrested because the Maoist rebels are blocking it?

What is the state of the people of India at 
present? With its current high rate of growth, 
this is also a country of abject poverty and 
extreme inequality. Home to 24 billionaires 
(second largest in Asia according to Forbes), 
India can also boast of 230 million people who go 
to bed on a half empty stomach (World Hunger Report).

A country whose economy grows at 9% cannot feed 
its own population ? at least 50% of the people 
live below the official poverty line and 47% of 
children below the age of three are underweight 
(World Bank report, Undernourished children: A 
call for reform and action). In this so called 
?hub of knowledge economy?, only 11% of the total 
population can afford higher education and 50% of 
the students drop out before class eight to start 
living as casual labourers (Education Statistics, 
Ministry of Human Resource Development). This is 
true of most of India not just the areas where 
Maoist influence and control is high. Then how 
can we say that development in India is being blocked by Maoists?

Maoists do not oppose ?development? at all, they 
only oppose the ?pro-rich development? at the 
expense of destitution or often total destruction 
of the poor. For example, in Dandakaranya region 
of Chhattisgarh they oppose setting up of 
helipads but there, the poor themselves, led by 
the Maoist rebels, have built irrigation tanks 
and wells for help in agriculture something the 
Indian government did not bother to do. The 
Indian government routinely blames the Maoist 
rebels that they blow up schools! But what the 
Government tries to suppress is that these 
blown-up school buildings were actually being 
used or requisitioned to become camps for security personnel!

And what changes do they want? Why do they want these changes?

(1) Overhauling the entire structure of oppression instead of piecemeal reforms

In addition to all the woes described above, 
India is also a country, where thousands of 
Muslims can be butchered in broad daylight by 
fascist Hindu forces (the most widespread and 
gruesome such pogrom in recent times happened in 
Gujarat in 2002), while the ministers and police 
look the other way. And these features are not 
stray results of the misdeeds of a few villains. 
The existing socio-political system in India has 
a built-in mechanism which ensures that the 
common masses would be oppressed by a rich and 
powerful few. Widespread systemic violence is 
required and is routinely applied by the Indian 
state so that common people remain disciplined 
and do not revolt in the face of oppression.

(2) Land to the tillers and destruction of the landlord class

About 60% of the Indian population is still 
dependent on agriculture. However the primary 
input, land, is predominantly concentrated in the 
hands of a few landlords and big farmers. Close 
to 60 percent of rural households are effectively 
landless [NSS report]. The elite in the villages, 
by their collusion with the corrupt politicians 
and bureaucrats have blocked any meaningful land 
reforms. In the last four decades the proportion 
of households with little or no land (landless 
and marginal farmer households) has increased 
steadily from 66% to 80%. On the other hand the 
top ten percent rural households own more land 
now than in 1951 (Source: NSS report).The Maoist 
revolutionaries want to change this to ensure 
equitable distribution of land. They do not deter 
from collective armed fight of the landless and 
poor peasants and the poor rural labourers 
against the existing state power for achieving this goal.

(3) Freedom from moneylenders and traders

Indebtedness in rural India has been increasing 
by leaps and bounds especially in the recent 
decades. Public rural banks are closing down due 
to relaxation of government regulation. 
Therefore, instead of securing credits from 
public institutional sources, rural folk are now 
being forced to approach the village money 
lenders (who are often big landlords or rich 
farmers as well) on a larger and larger scale. 
Unscrupulous traders are adding to the misery of 
the poor peasants. They sell spurious inputs to 
small and marginal peasants at exorbitant prices. 
They also make huge profits by buying their 
harvest at throwaway prices and selling them in urban areas at a premium.

Not-so-well-off peasants, in this no-win 
situation, of course end up needing substantial 
credit. Private moneylenders and various 
for-profit financial companies take advantage of 
this situation by extracting enormous sums from 
peasants. Interest rate could be as high as 5% 
per month. The BBC News reported that more than 
200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India 
since 1997 under the pressure of such 
indebtedness. The Maoist rebels want to change this.

(4) End of caste system and eradication of untouchability

It is well known that the caste system is still 
thriving in India. Economically it keeps the 
overwhelming majority of the people in dire 
poverty and politically it suppresses their 
fundamental democratic rights. Often the lower 
castes are robbed of their human dignity. They 
are even denied access to public facilities like 
some sources of drinking water, schools etc. An 
expert group of the planning commission reports 
that in 70% villages lower caste people cannot 
enter places of worship and in more than 50% 
villages they don?t have access to common water 
sources 
(<http://planningcommission.gov.in/reports/publications/rep_dce.pdf>Expert 
committee report to the Planning Commission).

According to an NCDHR report, on average, 27 
atrocities (including murder, abduction and rape) 
against dalits take place every day. The well-off 
landed sections in the villages still come mainly 
from the upper castes. They use brahminical 
ideology to try to keep all other sections of the 
population under domination. The same is true for 
usurers, merchants, hoarders, quarry owners, 
contractors-all mainly come from the upper 
castes. In short, the upper castes are still very 
much in command in all aspects of rural life. 
Often with their own private army of goondas they 
run a parallel raj. The Maoists want to break 
this stranglehold of the upper castes and ensure 
equal rights for dalits and adivasis.

(5) Freedom from exploitation by foreign multinationals and its local partners

Since 1991, foreign capital in alliance with big 
capitalists like Reliance, Tata and state 
bureaucrats, has penetrated vast sectors of the 
Indian economy. Every sphere of our life, 
starting from road construction, electricity 
generation, communication networks to food 
retail, health and education are under direct 
control of this coterie. In the name of 
?development? thousands of acres of land are 
being transferred to big business and 
multinationals. For example, in Bastar, 
Chattisgarh, in the name of Bodh Ghat dam, tens 
of thousands of Adivasis are being forcibly 
evicted from their ?jal-jangal-zameen? 
(water-forest-land). In Niyamgiri, Orissa the 
land which is the abode of several Dongria tribes 
has been handed over to the multinational Vedanta 
group which will completely destroy the 
livelihood of these tribes affecting more than 
20,000 people. The state government and the 
mainstream opposition parties of the state are 
actively supporting such activities. The Maoists, 
over the years, have been resisting such plunder.

(6) Ensuring people?s democratic rights

It is well known that elections are often a sham 
in India. The parliament, as we have seen several 
times, is a bazaar where the rich and the 
super-rich can buy the MPs. According to ADR 
(Association of Democratic Reform), the average 
asset of an MP has gone up to 5.12 crore in 2009 
from Rs 1.8 crore in 2004. In our democracy the 
erstwhile rajas and maharajas, like Scindias, are 
still proliferating and controlling the local 
economy and polity at many places.

And we also know the state of judicial system in 
our country. Salman Khans and Sanjeev Nandas can 
kill by running cars over common people and still 
they can escape the law for very long, perhaps 
forever. B.N. Kirpal, the judge, who arbitrarily 
ordered that Indian rivers be interlinked, 
ignoring the resulting ecological and human 
calamity, joined the environmental board of 
Coca-Cola after he retired. The Maoists want to 
establish people?s court where poor people can 
get true justice. In fact, such courts run in 
many places where the Maoist movement is strong.

(7) Self-determination for the nationalities

The Indian government ruthlessly suppresses 
national aspirations of a number of people. These 
people and their land became part of India by 
accident ? because the British raj annexed their 
homeland or a despotic king wanted their land to 
be a part of India. Lakhs of Indian troops have 
been deployed in Kashmir and north-eastern states 
to curb such struggles of the people in these 
states for their national self-determination. 
Since 1958, AFSPA has been imposed in 
north-eastern states, which allows armed forces 
to conduct search and seizure without warrant, to 
arrest without warrant, to destroy any house 
without any verification and to shoot to kill 
with full impunity. In Kashmir, there is 1 
military personnel for every 15 civilian. Cold 
blooded murders, like those of Thangjam Manorama 
Devi, Chungkham Sanjit, Neelofar and Asiya Jan, 
are carried out frequently in the name of 
?countering terrorism?. The Maoist rebels seek to 
establish freedom of self determination for all nationalities.

So, to sum up, the new society the Maoists want 
to establish will have the following components:

-Land to the poor and landless. Later on 
cooperative farming is to be established on voluntary basis.

-Forest to the tribal people.

-End of rule of the rich and the upper caste in 
villages and uprooting of caste system. Uproot 
all discriminations based on gender and religion.

-Seizure of the ill gotten wealth and assets of 
multinational corporations and their local Indian partners.

-Self determination for the nationalities, political autonomy for the tribes.

-Establish a state by the poor, for the poor 
where the present day exploiters would be expropriated.

-Participation of people in day to day 
administrative work and decision making. 
Democracy at the true grassroot level with people 
having the power to recall its democratic representatives.

In summary: ensuring that all types of freedom, 
rights and democracy for all sections of toiling masses.

What have the Maoists-led people?s struggles achieved so far?

Information in this section is taken, purposely, 
from 
<http://planningcommission.gov.in/reports/publications/rep_dce.pdf>the 
expert group report to the planning commission, which is available on the web.

Contrary to what the media try to portray, the 
government?s own report says that the movement 
led by the Maoist rebels cannot be seen as simply 
blowing up of police stations and killing 
individual people. It encompasses mass 
organization. Mass participation in militant 
protest has always been a characteristic of such mobilisation.

Although the Maoists by their own admission are 
engaged in a long term people?s struggle against 
the oppression by the present India state, their 
movement has already achieved some short term 
successes in improving the condition of the poor people.

Maoist movement in India was built around the 
demand of ?land to the tillers?. Numerous 
struggles, led by the Maoists, have been fought 
all over the country especially in Andhra 
Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, to free land from 
the big landholding families. In many such cases 
landlords have been driven away from the villages 
and their land has been put in the possession of 
the landless poor. But the police and 
paramilitary do not allow the poor to cultivate 
such lands. In Bihar, landless Musahars, the 
lowest among the Dalits have struggled and have 
taken possession of fallow Government land. This 
has had the support of Maoists.

Under the leadership of the Maoists the adivasis 
have reclaimed forest land on an extensive scale 
in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, the Vidarbha 
region of Maharashtra, Orissa and Jharkhand. The 
adivasis displaced by irrigation projects in 
Orissa had to migrate to the forests of 
Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh in large 
numbers. The forest department officials harassed 
and evicted them on a regular basis. The movement 
led by the Maoists put an end to this.

In rural India the Minimum Wages Act remains an 
act on paper only. In the forest areas of Andhra 
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Maharashtra, and 
Jharkhand, non-payment of the legal wages was a 
major source of exploitation of adivasi labourer. 
Maoists-led struggles have put an effective end 
to it. These struggles have secured increases in 
the rate of payment for picking tendu leaves 
(used for rolling beedies), washing clothes, 
making pots, tending cattle, repairing implements 
etc. The exploitation previously had been so 
severe that as a result of the sustained movement 
led by Maoists the pay rates of tendu leaves 
collection have over the years increased by fifty times.

The movement has given confidence to the 
oppressed to assert their rights and demand 
respect and dignity from the dominant castes and 
classes. The everyday humiliation and sexual 
exploitation of labouring women of dalit and 
tribal communities by upper caste men has been 
successfully fought. Forced labour, begari, by 
which the toiling castes had to provide 
obligatory service for free to the upper castes 
was also put an end to in many parts of the country.

In rural India, disputes are commonly taken to 
the rich and powerful of the village (who are 
generally the landlords) and caste panchayats, 
where the dispensation of justice is in favour of 
the rich and powerful. The Maoist movement has 
provided a mechanism, usually described as the 
?People?s Court? whereby these disputes are 
resolved in the interests of the wronged party.

Why then, does the government need to go to war 
against its own people led by these rebels 
instead of hailing them as true patriots?

There is a simple answer. Chattisgarh, Orissa are 
rich in mineral wealth that can be sold to the 
highest multinational bidder. The only obstacle 
standing between the corrupt politicians and ALL 
THIS MONEY are the poor, disenfranchised tribal 
people (and the Maoists leading them). So, this 
war. This is not something new in India or for 
that matter in other parts of the world. Mobutu?s 
corrupt regime selling off the Belgian Congo 
piece by piece to the US, Belgium and other 
countries comes to mind. In the sixty years of 
independence from direct colonial rule, the 
Indian state has been doing the same. It has 
systematically impoverished the overwhelming 
majority to serve the interest of a powerful few and their foreign friends.

The impending war to evict the tribal people from 
their villages, in the pretext of eliminating the 
Maoists, will be fought at the behest of big 
corporations, who want to control and plunder our 
resources such as mineral, water and forest. It 
is high time that we recognize this pattern of 
waging war which will be fought by the poor on 
both sides, but will benefit only the big 
capitalists and their cheerleaders in the government.

<http://radicalnotes.com/journal/2009/11/19/war-against-the-maoists-but-who-are-they-and-what-do-they-want/>Radical 
Notes, November 19, 2009




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  2 10:59:35 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:59:35 -0700
Subject: [News] Puerto Rico - Police Attacks Calculated to Supress Civil
	Rights
Message-ID: <mailman.142.1278082773.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

PUERTO RICO: OPERATIONS CALCULATED TO RESTRICT CIVIL RIGHTS

http://www.argenpress.info/2010/07/puerto-rico-operaciones-calculadas-para.html
Jes?s D?vila
translated by Jan Susler

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, July 1, 2010 (NCM) ? A 
calculated police operation, according to sworn 
testimony this morning by one of the agents, left 
yesterday afternoon in front of the Capitol 
dozens of demonstrators injured and journalists 
attacked, and served as a framework so that 
behind closed doors the legislature could annul 
the university students? constitutional rights of 
assembly and freedom of speech.

The sworn statement? a copy of which NCM News 
obtained? specifies how the order to disperse the 
crowd was given at least two hours before more 
than a hundred Puerto Rico Police, among them the 
anti-riot force, the horses of the mounted unit 
and a helicopter, swept with batons, kicks and 
gas hundreds of demonstrators who insisted on 
asserting the right that the  legislature be open to the public.

To make matters even worse, the first to be 
violently dispersed were the reporters from the 
student media, who had gone to the Capitol to 
cover the events, and whose press credentials the 
government refused to recognize. Several member 
of the general press and at least two legislators ended up injured as well.

At the close of this edition, a statement was 
expected from the media guilds as well as an 
urgent press conference by the Puerto Rican 
Independence Party, calling the Puerto Rico Police action ?gorilla-like.?

Without knowing that it had all happened in a 
calculated way by police commands, Capitol 
employees last night expressed their indignation 
at the picture of some of their vehicles 
overturned by the mass of students, professors, 
and support groups that faced the onslaught of 
batons and gas by police who had no fear of 
punishment. A little later, the legislature 
announced the approval of a new measure that 
eliminated student assemblies and substituted 
them with a remote electronic voting system, 
which any public expression by an official 
student leader must also be subjected to.

The measure substitutes for another which had 
proposed the system of internet voting for 
assemblies of every university organism, 
including professors, and which a source in the 
industry estimated would cost over $50 million to 
establish. That measure would have exempted only 
the Board of Trustees, which would be the only 
organism capable of deliberating and decision 
making without being subjected to the restrictions.

But in fact, a source of the ruling New 
Progressive Party? which in the past has provided 
reliable information and even confidential 
documents? assured days ago that the objective 
was to change the project to the one that was 
ultimately adopted. The source indicated that 
it?s all part of a broader agenda to eliminate in 
Puerto Rico the old constitutional right of 
freedom of assembly and substitute it with 
electronic voting, which would guarantee the 
preponderance of the so-called silent majority.
Minutes before the new restriction on 
constitutional rights was approved, the minority 
opposition Popular Democratic Party had withdrawn 
from the Senate floor, as a sign of protest. 
Senate president Thomas Rivera Schatz proclaimed 
that they had managed to be able to complete the 
final work of the ordinary session of the 
Legislature ?in this peaceful environment.?

Rivera Schatz himself was an important piece in 
the entire operation when on Friday last week, in 
an action for which officials provided 
contradictory explanations, he ordered the 
expulsion of all journalists from the Senate 
sessions. To accomplish this, he used armed 
police and locks that blocked the press from 
entering, and it stood out in public opinion that 
the public galleries in the third floor had been 
closed since the end of last year.

The PDP minority and the journalists turned to 
separate legal recourse, still pending in court, 
while a group of students from the University of 
Puerto Rico Mayag?ez campus called for a 
demonstration yesterday, at which the student 
collectives from several campuses throughout the 
country came together. The Senate, meanwhile, 
which had gone back to permitting journalists to 
enter and which had opened its galleries, put the 
locks back on, and starting early in the 
afternoon the anti-riot squads, known as the 
?Shock Troops? entered the building.

The problem of civil rights is crucial for the 
statehood movement, which has been complaining 
for years that the social and political 
institutions don?t recognize its overwhelming 
majority, as a result of which they have taken 
steps such as last year?s elimination of 
compulsory bar association membership for 
attorneys, because statehood has never gotten a 
majority at its conventions. On the other hand, 
the government understands that the student 
movement carried out a successful two month 
strike that paralyzed the eleven UPR campuses.

Similarly, the legislature approved another 
measure, to criminalize any social protest that 
paralyzes public or private construction sites.

But the isolation of the NPP, barely a year and a 
half after having won the most sweeping electoral 
victory in its history, isn?t limited to the 
student revolt or the political opposition. The 
party is already showing signs of division, such 
as growing complaints from important business 
sectors such as the hotel and insurance 
industries, as well as small town governments.

The situation has a lot to do with the attempts 
to increase government funds, while the country 
continues to be submerged in a galloping economic 
crisis, with more than 100,000 jobs lost since 
the beginning of last year. In this context, the 
divided labor movement continues to be paralyzed, 
and in the social sphere, only groups like the 
students present an articulate opposition to governmental plans.

With great difficulty, at the end of the night, 
the legislature managed to approve a deficit 
budget for state agencies, from the marble and 
alabaster building of the Capitol, in whose 
shadow, even hours after the incidents, the acrid 
odor of tear gas could still be breathed.






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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  2 11:28:21 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:28:21 -0700
Subject: [News] Queers Against Israeli Apartheid refuse to be silenced
Message-ID: <mailman.149.1278084593.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


Queers Against Israeli Apartheid refuse to be silenced
Savannah Garmon, The Electronic Intifada, 1 July 2010

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11368.shtml

----------

On the morning of 25 May, the Board of Pride Toronto held a press 
conference on the lawn outside its offices to announce that the 
phrase "Israeli Apartheid" would be censored from the upcoming 2010 
Pride Parade. The decision, aimed at banning the Toronto-based 
activist group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from the parade, set 
off a firestorm in the community, including refusals to participate 
in the festival and an open letter denouncing the decision by eight 
founding members who organized the first Toronto Pride parade in 1981.

The attempt to ban political speech at Pride Toronto fits a clear 
pattern -- Israel's public relations machine has attempted to malign 
critics and silence dissent around the world for decades. And these 
attempts have recently reached new heights in Canada, in response to 
the success that Palestine solidarity activists in Canada have 
achieved in recent years.

The first Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) -- now an annual, 
international political gathering -- was held on the University of 
Toronto campus in 2005. The organizers of IAW have endorsed the call 
by Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions 
(BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law. The 
BDS movement is modeled on the boycott campaign that was successful 
in helping to bring apartheid to an end in South Africa through 
nonviolent means.

The apartheid analogy has put Israel and its apologists on the 
offensive because it has garnered unexpected levels of support 
through BDS and other tactics that aim to challenge Israeli state policy.

On 2 June 2009, the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat 
anti-Semitism (CPCCA) was formed "... for the stated purpose of 
confronting and combating anti-Semitism in Canada today." However, 
most people involved in the BDS movement saw this as a thinly-veiled 
smear campaign against critics of Israel. The real goal of the CPCCA 
seems to be to conflate all meaningful criticism of Israeli state 
policy with anti-Semitism -- in fact, many believe it may attempt to 
amend Canada's anti-discrimination laws to label criticism of Israel 
as hate speech.

Outright censorship is not the only means in the Israel lobby's 
toolkit for silencing opposition. In recent years, Israel has 
embarked upon a "re-branding" campaign to promote an image of itself 
as a modern, liberal society with open values while whitewashing its 
deplorable human rights record.

A key component of this campaign has been the promotion of Israel as 
a nation with a progressive outlook on lesbian, gay, bisexual and 
transgender (LGBT) issues, especially in relation to its neighbors 
and Palestinian society. There is truth in this, at least for the 
Israeli Jewish population, but claims that this is of widespread 
benefit to Palestinian queers and trans people (e.g. Tel Aviv as a 
"gay Mecca") are unfounded. More importantly, that Israel recognizes 
same-sex marriages performed in other countries does nothing to 
excuse the humanitarian disaster that has resulted from its siege and 
attacks on Gaza.

It was in response to this re-branding campaign that Queers Against 
Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) formed. In fact, there are several members 
of QuAIA who also marched against South African apartheid during the 
1980s in solidarity with South African anti-apartheid activist Simon 
Nkoli, who was a black gay man. Even then, critics disparaged their 
presence in the Pride parade in Toronto, pointing to relatively 
greater acceptance of homosexuality in the white South African 
community compared to blacks living under apartheid. Today, queer 
activists have begun to label this type of expropriation of the LGBT 
struggle to distract from other human rights abuses with the term 
"pink-washing."

QuAIA also endorses the Palestinian civil society call for BDS, and 
in particular a September 2009 initiative to boycott LGBT leisure 
tourism to Israel. This campaign was initiated in response to the 
International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association's decision to hold a 
tourism conference in Tel Aviv in coordination with an Israeli LGBT 
group, Aguda, despite the Palestinian call for the boycott of Israel.

To challenge the re-branding campaign, QuAIA took its message to the 
2008 and 2009 Pride festivals in Toronto, marching without incident. 
The Israel lobby responded to QuAIA's presence with outrage and 
initiated a smear campaign against the group. Israel lobby groups 
such as B'nai Brith and the Simon Wiesenthal center attempted to 
portray QuAIA as an anti-Semitic hate group, despite the fact that 
many of our members have histories of anti-racist activism and many 
are Jewish themselves.

After the 2009 parade, a propaganda film was made against QuAIA by a 
local gay Jewish lawyer and self-proclaimed "gay activist." The film 
was distributed to city councilors in an attempt to convince them to 
pass a city resolution that threatened to defund Pride Toronto unless 
they banned our group from marching in 2010. What followed was a 
complex series of events; eventually, it was revealed through a 
freedom of information request that a small group of city 
bureaucrats, councilors and pro-Israel lobbyists colluded to eject 
QuAIA from the Pride parade despite the fact that they were aware 
that QuAIA in no way violated the city's anti-discrimination policy. 
Notwithstanding this revelation, the Board of Pride Toronto voted 4-3 
on 21 May to ban QuAIA, giving in to this year-long smear campaign.

The fallout from Pride Toronto's decision has been tremendous. The 
queer community of Toronto was galvanized to confront Pride about 
censorship -- after all, censorship has been previously used in 
Canada to force LGBT individuals back into the closet -- and it has 
also brought forward other concerns about de-politicization, 
corporatization and fair representation of less privileged 
communities within the LGBT umbrella. And after a month-long 
community organizing effort, Pride rescinded the ban on 26 June -- a 
significant victory for free speech and the Canadian Palestine 
solidarity movement as a whole.

In a more general sense, across North America -- and even the world 
-- the realization seems to be spreading in the LGBT community that 
our identities and our rights are being used as an excuse to deny the 
identity and the rights of another people, halfway across the globe.

Well before QuAIA formed, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism has 
been championing the message of queer solidarity with Palestine in 
San Francisco. In the wake of the ban against QuAIA and the massive 
attention it has received, at least four new groups have formed 
worldwide projecting a similar message.

Further, a channel of communication has begun to develop between 
queer activists in Palestine and those in the Palestinian Diaspora. 
The two main Palestinian LGBT organizations, ASWAT and al-Qaws, have 
released a joint statement condemning Pride Toronto's banning of our 
group while a new queer Palestinian group has formed endorsing the 
call for BDS. In the end QuAIA invited the Palestinian director of 
al-Qaws to visit with QuAIA during Pride -- she will be marching with 
us in the upcoming parade. In light of all this, the claim some in 
Canada make that "the Palestine/Israel conflict has nothing to do 
with the queer struggle" is further deflated every day.

So it seems that while LGBT people in Palestine have begun speaking 
out both for themselves and for their people as a whole, LGBT 
activists in the West are starting to realize they cannot allow their 
struggles to be co-opted by Israel's colonization schemes. And here 
in Toronto, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid will not be silenced. 
QuAIA will march in this year's Pride Parade this Sunday, 4 July, and 
our demand for justice for all Palestinians, queer and straight 
alike, will be voiced.

Savannah Garmon is an activist for transgender rights, sex worker 
rights and has been active with various groups in the Palestine 
solidarity movement since 2002. She will proudly carry a sign in 
Toronto's upcoming Pride Parade reading "This trans woman is against 
Israeli apartheid and queerer than you."



Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Sat Jul  3 09:53:59 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Sat, 03 Jul 2010 06:53:59 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Luis_Posada_Carriles=92_right_hand_man_nabb?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?ed_in_Venezuela?=
Message-ID: <mailman.13.1278165327.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Luis Posada Carriles? right hand man, Francisco 
Ch?vez Abarca, nabbed in Venezuela

Posted: 02 Jul 2010 05:15 PM PDT

Francisco Ch?vez Abarca, Posada Carriles? Right 
Hand Man, Captured in Venezuela - 
<http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2010/07/02/capturan-en-venezuela-a-francisco-chavez-abarca-mano-derecha-de-posada-carriles/>espa?ol

Translation: Machetera for Tlaxcala

Hugo Ch?vez, Venezuela?s president, reported 
today that the Salvadoran Francisco Ch?vez 
Abarca, accused of being Luis Posada Carriles? 
right hand man, and the author of various 
explosive attacks in Cuba, was arrested in a 
nighttime intelligence operation on Thursday when he tried to enter Venezuela.

In an address from Miraflores Palace (the 
government headquarters), the Venezuelan leader 
explained that Abarca was arrested in the airport 
at Maiquet?a (in the north) and was transferred 
to the headquarters of the Bolivarian 
Intelligence Service (SEBIN) for interrogation.

Nicknamed ?Potbelly,? Ch?vez Abarca is on 
Interpol?s Most Wanted list due to his 
implication in various attacks with explosives in Cuba in the 1990?s.

In the wake of the capture, the Venezuelan 
president asked what might have been the 
Salvadoran?s intention in trying to enter the 
country and ordered verification of the person(s) awaiting him.

?Who wanted Ch?vez Abarca in Venezuela?  Who was 
awaiting him?? the Venezuelan leader asked, 
before reporting that Ch?vez Abarca will be 
delivered to Interpol so that he can be sent to 
Cuba, the country that requested his capture.

He said that ?this gentleman came here to kill me 
- that?s what my heart says,? and he asked for 
collaboration to clarify the ?special mission 
that he came to complete in Venezuela.?

Ch?vez said that midway through the advance of 
the revolution and close to the parliamentary 
elections in September ?it is very strange that a 
terrorist of this caliber should come.?

?Posada Carriles ought to be really nervous 
because we?ve caught one of his people,? he added.

Ch?vez Abarca was under arrest in El Salvador for 
two years for being the leader of a gang 
dedicated to vehicle theft in that country, but 
sidestepped sentencing for other international crimes of which he was accused.

Ch?vez Abarca and 21 members of his gang were 
arrested under charges of automobile theft and 
swindling.  Authorities assured at the time that 
they were dealing with ?one of the main 
structures of organized crime dedicated to 
vehicle theft on a national and Central American level.?

On October 28, 2007, a complacent judge freed 
Ch?vez Abarca from his criminal 
charges.  However, he never had to answer for his 
role as the principal accomplice of Luis Posada 
Carriles.  The campaign for his arrest was never 
mentioned before Salvadoran courts, despite repeated complaints.

In the 1990s, there were indications that he had 
dedicated himself to drug trafficking as well as 
arms sales and currency counterfeiting in Guatemala.

He used the aliases Manuel Gonz?lez, Roberto 
Sol?rzano and William Gonz?lez, and went on three 
short trips to Cuba in April and May of 1997 to 
engage in various attacks there.

In 1997 he detonated a bomb with 600 grams of C-4 
that caused structural damage in the bathrooms of 
the Ach? discotheque in the Hotel Melia Cohiba, on April 12, 1997.

On the 30th of the same month, an explosive 
device with 401 grams of C-4 that the Salvadoran 
had put in an ornamental planter on the 15th 
floor of the same hotel was defused.

Furthermore, on May 24th, while Ch?vez Abarca was 
in M?xico, a bomb exploded in the offices of the 
Cubanac?n corporation in the capital.

President Ch?vez recalled that it has been five 
years since his government made a formal petition 
to Washington for the extradition of Posada 
Carriles, an ex-agent of the Central Intelligence 
Agency (CIA).  Posada Carriles is 82 years old 
and is responsible for, among other crimes, the 
explosive attack in October 6, 1976 against 
Cubana de Aviaci?n Flight 455, where all 73 people on board were killed.

Posada Carriles is free in the United States and 
only accused of violating immigration laws.  The 
United States has not answered Venezuela?s extradition request.

It was Posada Carriles? recruit who planted the 
bomb that killed Fabio di Celmo.

In 1997, following instructions from Posada 
Carriles, ?Potbelly? Ch?vez Abarca was the person 
who contracted with the mercenary Ernesto Cruz 
Le?n and charged him with carrying out terrorist 
missions in Cuba, telling him that he himself had 
done it, and shortly thereafter he trained his 
recruit in the preparation of explosive devices.

This was how Cruz Le?n came to make two trips to 
Cuba during which he planted bombs in Havana 
hotels, one of which killed the young Italian 
tourist Fabio de Celmo, on September 4, 1997.  It 
was the most tragic moment in the criminal terror 
campaign unleashed by Posada on behalf of the 
Cuban American National Foundation, created by the CIA.

(With reporting from Telesur)

Machetera is a member of 
<http://www.tlaxcala.es/>Tlaxcala, the 
international network of translators for 
linguistic diversity. This translation may be 
reprinted as long as the content remains 
unaltered, and the source and translator are cited.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Sun Jul  4 18:04:24 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:04:24 -0700
Subject: [News] Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory Unleashes Brutal Civil
 Rights Backlash
Message-ID: <mailman.26.1278281064.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd>Maritza Stanchich, Ph.D.

Posted: July 4, 2010 11:40 AM
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html


<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html>University 
of Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory Unleashes Brutal Civil Rights Backlash

As so many Americans gear up for Fourth of July 
fireworks this weekend, the U.S. Territory of 
Puerto Rico roils from a brutal civil rights 
showdown unleashed by a far-right wing 
government, now seemingly hell bent on destroying 
the recent unprecedented victory of a two-month 
long student strike against privatization of 
higher education at the University of Puerto Rico.

The broader implications are crucial on numerous 
fronts, including the struggle to maintain broad 
access to public higher education and efforts to 
rein in runaway neoliberal policies that have 
wreaked havoc on the global economy, resulting in 
draconian austerity measures worldwide. For the 
violence and repression seen in Greece and at the 
G20 in Toronto appears to now be visiting this 
Caribbean island nation of about four million 
U.S. citizens, the homeland of more than an 
additional four million Puerto Ricans in the 
United States, the second largest U.S. Latino group.

While the economic crisis in Puerto Rico--the 
worst since the 1940s, if not the 1930s-has been 
deepening for years, and the current right wing 
government has aggressively implemented a 
hard-line, unpopular neoliberal agenda since its 
broad electoral victory last November, it appears 
as if the recent UPR student strike victory has 
touched off a firestorm, with a police attack on 
peaceful demonstrators at Puerto Rico's Capitol 
building on Wednesday injuring dozens, some seriously.

The UPR strike concluded June 21 after a tense, 
two-month shut down of 10 campuses in a system 
serving nearly 65,000 students at the end of the 
academic year, with an accord that by all 
accounts was an unprecedented strike victory, in 
historic, hemispheric terms. A widely-supported 
student movement remarkable for its coalition 
building across traditionally distinct and even 
contentious social and political sectors 
coalesced against threatened erosion of broad 
public access to the widely-regarded state 
university, as well as its increasing privatization.

With tensions high after police and riot squads 
had attacked and injured students, their parents 
and journalists on at least three occasions, an 
agreement finally reached through judicial 
mediation met with the students' basic demands, 
reinstating cancelled tuition waivers, 
temporarily forestalling a tuition hike or 
imposition of student fees, and protecting strike 
leaders from summary suspension reprisals. The 
accord, signed by a majority of the Board of 
Trustees, though those refusing included the 
university and board presidents, was hailed as an 
achievement in civil conflict resolution, 
especially in light of the history of previous 
UPR strikes that had ended in deadly violent repressions.

Immediately after however, the Puerto Rico state 
legislature, dominated by the extreme right of 
the local Pro-Statehood party, rapidly expanded 
the university Board of Trustees, with the 
governor approving four new appointees, and a new 
but divided board quickly imposed a $800 student 
fee starting in January, and made it permanent, 
reminiscent of the imposition of fees at 
University of California by then Gov. Ronald 
Reagan. The legislature also quickly dismantled a 
long-standing UPR tradition of student 
assemblies, replacing them with private 
electronic computer voting devoid of open debate. 
Other cuts were also implemented affecting 
professors and adjunct instructors, who now make 
up about 40 percent of the UPR faculty, following 
trends in the United States, where 60 percent of 
all professors occupy such increasingly precarious positions.

In a far worse economic straits than the states 
of California or Michigan, Puerto Rico is 
confronting its worst fiscal crisis in decades, 
and UPR the biggest fiscal crisis of its 100-year 
existence. As throughout much of the world facing 
related circumstances, virulent and organized 
opposition to drastic cuts principally directed 
at the working and deteriorating middle classes 
has mushroomed, especially since the current 
global crisis, in Alan Greenspan's own befuddled 
words, was caused by greed-induced corruption 
among the highest echelons of the world economy.

While the neoliberal agenda of Puerto Rico's 
current political leaders look back to the very 
doctrines now being challenged in the United 
States and throughout Latin America, the UPR 
student movement embodies the vanguard of the 
contemporary 21st Century, as reflected by their 
symbols and tactics, including the democratizing 
internet, egalitarian rainbow flags, sustainable 
organic farming, an effervescence of alternative 
arts, and new coalition building among center, 
right and left, in tandem with occupation 
practices inspired by international student 
movements as far as California, Spain, France and Greece.

Though a shocking collective trauma, the violent 
crackdown at the Capitol Wednesday was not 
entirely surprising given the current 
administration's assault on all fronts since 
coming into power, targeting progressive, 
cultural and social welfare institutions and 
agencies with crippling budget cuts, attempting 
to dissolve Puerto Rico's bar association, 
lifting environmental protections to whole swaths 
of protected lands, and passing a now notorious 
law, called Ley 7, that not only dismisses 20,000 
public employees, but declares null and void all 
public sector union contracts for three years, 
with the only recourse to challenging the law 
being to petition the local Supreme Court, now 
stacked with new appointments in the 
administration's favor. The governor has also 
activated the National Guard, amidst criticism 
from groups such the Puerto Rico chapters of the 
ACLU and Amnesty International.

Common in Puerto Rico, however, though unusual at 
most U.S. state universities, is the way 
political parties assume control of UPR 
leadership by appointing a new president, also 
recently achieved. This is in part because the 
UPR is widely regarded as national patrimony, and 
is one of the few places left in the country where dissent may be cultivated.

As opposition to these policies expands, as seen 
in a massive national strike in October which 
drew a quarter of a million workers into the 
streets, so has the government's seeming 
intolerance to any opposition, as Gov. Luis 
Fortu?o, Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz 
and UPR president Jos? Ram?n de la Torre commonly 
resort to Cold War era red-baiting with media 
campaigns labeling protestors as Socialists, 
Communists, and professional rabble rousers out 
to destabilize the country. The clamp down has so 
far gone as far as banning journalists from 
Senate chambers for four days last week during 
the country's budget sessions, prompting media 
organizations to petition in court to regain access.

"I don't think there is any doubt that the 
intention of this government is to set back civil 
rights," said Judith Berkan, a long-time civil 
rights attorney and a law professor at University 
of Puerto Rico and InterAmerican University in 
San Juan, adding that the administration has 
enacted a staggering number of measures to 
neutralize and debilitate all those perceived as 
a threat to a local oligarchy acting in concert with U.S. interests.

Attempts were made to reach Resident Commissioner 
Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico's non-voting 
representative in the U.S. Congress, and UPR 
President Jos? Ram?n de la Torre for comment, but 
they were not available at press time.

The irony that the Pro-U.S. Statehood party of 
Gov. Fortu?o is now curtailing the most basic 
press and civil liberties is not lost on UPR 
student strike leaders who witnessed and were 
injured at Wednesday's melee, including those who 
belong to the pro-Statehood party themselves, and 
voted for the sitting governor.

"It pains me as a statehooder that this 
government has not learned the lessons of U.S. 
civil rights struggles of decades ago," said 
An?bal N??ez, a student at the UPR law school and 
a member of the student negotiating committee.

N??ez acknowledged the participation of students 
affiliated with Socialist groups among strike 
leaders and the student negotiating committee, 
and said they overcame their differences via 
universal concerns for education as a social 
necessity, as they gained each others' respect 
while coalition building together, adding that if 
he could not overcome ideological differences 
enough to collaborate, he would still believe in 
their right to pluralistically exist.

The notion that accessible, quality higher 
education contributes to economic recovery runs 
counter to the widening U.S. trend of students 
graduating with crippling debt, as public 
education has for years now faced diminishing 
state support. A common argument used by the 
administration during the UPR strike was its 
affordable tuition, at less than $2,000 per year 
for undergraduates before the recently imposed 
fees. But while tuition is cheaper than probably 
any other state university in the United States, 
average income in Puerto Rico is also far lower 
than any other U.S. state, with about 48 percent 
of the population living in poverty as defined by 
U.S. federal standards, and the cost of living in 
San Juan at least, far higher than at oft 
compared institutions in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 
or Oxford, Mississippi. This tradition of 
maintaining broad public access to a quality 
state institution of higher learning is a hard 
earned point of pride at UPR, compared to 
institutions that have recently reneged their 
public mission with sudden and steep fee/tuition 
increases, such as at University of California, 
where students also opposed, occupied and met 
with police repression, but could not stave off a 
32% fee hike imposed in November.

As UPR administrators continue to grapple with 
what was a nearly $200 million budget shortfall 
for next year going into the strike, in search of 
additional or alternative money saving and 
raising sources, an emboldened student movement 
will also regroup and weigh all its options. 
Future conflicts may be averted by altering the 
very style of governance at UPR, a top-down and 
paternalistic holdover from the past, as this 
could go a long way toward making students, as 
well as professors and staff who also have large 
stakes at play, part of a give-and-take process.

For come what may in the global fiscal crisis in 
the coming decade, these students are the future 
of new Americas of increasingly porous borders 
and dramatic, rapid demographic, political, 
cultural, informational and economic shifts, as 
the old order, the vestiges of the Cold War in 
Puerto Rico and in South Florida for example, fade into the proverbial sunset.

"We may not hold the power but we have the will 
power," stated law student N??ez, "and given the choice, I prefer the latter."

UPR administrators and Statehood party leaders 
would do well to recognize and reach out to the 
productive potential of this new power, shift 
gears and learn to act on the principles they purportedly hold dear.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul  6 11:24:33 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:24:33 -0700
Subject: [News] $280 million in Agriculture Losses Due to Gaza Blockade
Message-ID: <mailman.52.1278462771.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Report: Agriculture Losses Due to Gaza Blockade
http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8452

06.07.10 - 11:17

Rami Al Meghari ? Gaza - United Nations officials 
estimate that the Israeli led four year blockade 
on the Gaza Strip has caused some $280 million in agriculture losses.

Philip Lazerini leads the U.N. Office for the 
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the 
occupied territories says the blockade hampers the farming industry in Gaza.

"The agriculture sector is on the brink of 
collapse. The blockade is simply not allowing 
enough material for the farming community to 
sustain itself. Farmers must use all rusty 
equipment, or need to repair equipment. Herders 
are running out of drugs to treat their animals." Lazerini said.

Gaza farmers have concentrated their farming on 
some essential crops- like tomatoes, cucumbers, 
potatoes and, more recently, watermelon. But they 
have a difficult time obtaining seeds and fertilizers to grow crops.

In the central Gaza Strip village of Alzawayda, 
Suleiman Eid tills his land in preparation for 
planting vegetables. Eid has been a farmer for more than 40 years.

"Israel prevented entry of chemicals for 
fertilizing the land. As for the chemicals that 
come through Egypt, they  are not enough or 
efficient. As you see, this heap of organic 
fertilizers has cost me about $800. However, this 
needs chemicals to bolster it. For example, I 
need urea chemicals, but we don't have that at 
the local market. Also, there are other chemical 
substances that can not be found as well," Eid explains.

There are about 1.5 million residents in Gaza. In 
addition to [their own] livelihoods, Gazan 
farmers have played an important role in feeding 
the residents of the coastal territory. Gaza 
farmers also export crops, including strawberries 
and flowers. Before the blockade, Gaza farmers 
exported an estimated 32 million flowers. But 
over the last two years, Israel has restricted 
exports to about 700,000 flowers annually.

Another vital sector in Gaza is fishing, which 
provides an important source of protein to 
families. Under the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, Gaza 
fishermen are allowed to sail up to 12 nautical 
miles off Gaza shores. But Israel has restricted 
fishing boats to only 2 to 3 nautical miles off 
Gaza shores. And these areas have declining fish populations.

"Now we cannot go further off shore. Once we go 
further, an Israeli naval vessel prevents us. 
Consequently, all of us fishermen work within the 
same restricted range. Fishing is very 
restricted, and with all the fishermen working in 
the same area our living is very limited," says 
Maher Alnada a fisherman on the Rafah city coast in southern Gaza.

Recently, Israel has eased the blockade, 
following the deadly attack on a Gaza aid convoy 
and due to increased international pressure.

Raed Fattouh is the Palestinian Authority 
official in charge of coordinating entry of goods 
into Gaza.  He says that Israel has recently 
allowed some shipments of seeds and fishing tools into Gaza

"Currently, the Israeli side has allowed in 600 
items, unlike before, where only 130 items were 
allowed in. As for the goods allowed in, they 
meet the Gaza market needs, but raw materials 
and- more importantly- cement is needed in order 
to fill in the shortage," Fattouh reported.

More goods, such as electronic devices, will be 
allowed in soon, according to Fatthouh. Among the 
goods Israel added to the list: tomato sauce, 
chocolates, chips, children's toys, and some 
shipments of cement and steel to be used in U.N. construction projects.

Many Gazans downplay the decision, and call for a 
complete lifting of the blockade.  Jamal 
Alkhudari is a Gaza Member of Parliament and head 
of the Popular Committee for Breaking the Israeli blockade.

"So far, 3500 items are still banned from flowing 
into Gaza, and this is substantial evidence that 
the Israeli occupation is still enforcing the 
blockade. Yet, by easing the blockade, they 
attempt to send out a message to the outside 
world, to relax the international pressure on 
them on one hand, and legitimize the blockade, on 
the other hand." Alkhudari stated.

According to the Hamas-led agricultural ministry, 
12,000 fishermen are currently jobless, while 
more than 400 fishing boats are no longer functioning.

_______________________________________________________________

Rami Al Meghari is a Palestinian journalist for 
the Gaza Strip he reports for many local and 
international news outlets in both Arabic and 
English. He can be reached at  <mailto:ramimunir at gmail.com>ramimunir at gmail.com
This e-mail address is being protected from spam 
bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul  6 20:32:19 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:32:19 -0700
Subject: [News] Explosive Political Situation in Puerto Rico
Message-ID: <mailman.53.1278462771.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Explosive Political Situation in Puerto Rico

Written by Roberto Ramos-Perea
Tuesday, 06 July 2010 15:27

http://alainet.org/active/39225

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, 
groups of students, teachers and citizens asked 
for entry to the House of the Laws and they were 
struck and tortured by the Police, there are 
numerous injured people, while the National Guard 
is mobilized towards Capitol Hill. Violent shocks 
are scattered over the whole zone of the 
Parliament and the repression continues.

________

A constitutional coup has just been established in Puerto Rico.

After a year in which the present time government 
under the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo 
Progresista, that attempts to join the Island to 
the United States through statehood) tried to and 
succeeded in taking over many institutions that 
form the basis of the democratic government of 
Puerto Rico, an atmosphere of hostility followed 
by many reckless actions that threaten public 
peace had climaxed in violent and aggressive 
actions of this government against the parties of 
the opposition, the organized student movement, 
the labor unions, the press, the environment, as 
against every area and institution of Puerto Rico?s civil society.

This constitutional coup springs from the 
Legislative branch of the government under the 
command of Senator Thomas Rivera Schatz, endorsed 
by the central government, under the dominance of 
the Secretary Governor, counselor Marcos 
Rodr?guez Ema, with the obvious intent of having 
under their grasp and without opposition full 
control of every agency and organization that 
rule the judiciary, academic, economic and civil 
societies. In the face of this scenario, Governor 
Luis Fortu?o operates without volition, has no 
opinion, appearance nor public responsibility.

With the complete control of the High Court of 
Puerto Rico, the University of Puerto Rico Board 
of trustees, and the alleged control of the news 
media, among many others, the genuine 
participation of the People of Puerto Rico in all 
democratic processes protected by our Constitution is jeopardized.

The events started (through the rush approval of 
Law 7 by the Legislature) with more than 20,000 
public employee lay-offs, with the allegation 
that this would alleviate the gigantism of the 
government and would find the solution to the 
serious public deficit, that has never been 
properly evidenced. This decision has caused 
economical chaos, public services are worse than 
ever and it has generated despair and gloominess 
in every Puerto Rican family. In this same guise 
there exists a serious persecution against all 
artistic institutions of the country, strangling 
their budgets, trying with this action to avoid 
the propagation of art as dissidence. This, while 
the government favors contracts of obscene sums 
with hundreds of advisors, contractors and 
lobbyists associated with their own political party.

The attacks continued in the form of the 
appointment to the High Court of four Judges with 
a well known affiliation with, and militancy for 
the governing political party, achieving a 
majority of votes in favor of the present 
government on all decisions made in this Forum, 
on an individual basis. The government went on 
repressing and eliminating student participation 
on the procedures of the State University, 
suppressing tuition exemption rights for 
outstanding athletes and artists, among others; 
forcing the students from all eleven campuses of 
the University of Puerto Rico to declare a strike 
that lasted 60 days, generating ample support 
from the people of Puerto Rico and around the world.

The students on strike were successful in 
achieving their demands through negotiations that 
involved a First Instance Court and an appointed 
negotiator; however, Secretary of government 
Rodr?guez Ema is trying to invalidate these 
accords, saying that they ?are not worth the paper in which they were written?

This event preceded the Central government?s 
action of proposing a hasty law, that was signed 
with no revision within hours, adding four 
additional members to the Board of trustees of 
the University of Puerto Rico. These additions to 
the Board are unconditional members of the 
governing political party The students of the 
State University, who in the great majority 
depend on Federal grants, now face an annual 
recurring fee of $800.00, which they will not be 
able to pay and that they will not pay, forcing 
the students to return to their strike. With this 
strategy, the Central government risks the 
accreditation of the State University and as a 
consequence, the government would be able to privatize its assets.

Following this same direction, the government of 
Puerto Rico will attempt to sell and to divide 
for speculation a strip of land where the Karst 
formation stands, on the northwest of the Island. 
This area collects one third of our water 
supplies for the entire population; nonetheless, 
the government intends to put this area into 
private hands that would build a toll expressway 
over this zone that is rich ecologically and economically.

Passing up many other events, the budget of 
Puerto Rico was approved, together with countless 
laws which favor privatization, the dissolving of 
professional associations and the distribution of 
public funds into private hands, without the 
pertaining and compulsory hearings of public 
participation, reaching the extreme of turning 
off the microphones of the opposing political 
party members, in a despotic fashion.

The events climaxed last week when the FBI in 
Puerto Rico arrested Senator H?ctor Mart?nez, 
NPP, on charges of bribe, the selling of 
influences and other charges. Martinez is 
Senator?s Rivera Schatz right hand in the Senate. 
A public squabble reached the news between the 
Senator and the FBI, with the Senator fending the 
alleged innocence of Senator Mart?nez, who has 
been directly associated with drug traffic and 
who was filmed while committing bribery.

Then, last in his many violent and reckless acts, 
the president of the Senate, Rivera Schatz, using 
force and a real padlock, censored the access of 
the cameras and the news media to the Senate 
sessions, depriving the People of Puerto Rico of 
direct information about the discussions and 
voting sessions that were taking place about this 
year?s budget and other matter). The events 
resulted in verbal and physical violence between 
senators, rising indignation among the people to 
a point of an almost unsustainable state of outrage and wrath.

Counselor Rivera Schatz has taken virtual control 
of the country with his tyrannical and fascist 
ways; and it cannot be discarded that from these 
same seats, this same week, acts of persecution 
and acts of violence will be started against 
other sectors of the People, all approved by the 
Secretary Governor of Puerto Rico.

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, 
groups of students, teachers and citizens asked 
for entry to the House of the Laws and they were 
struck and tortured by the Police, there are 
numerous injured people, while the National Guard 
is mobilized towards Capitol Hill. Violent shocks 
are scattered over the whole zone of the 
Parliament and the repression continues.

This factual deed of control of the political 
power from within the Puerto Rican Nation 
violates all elementary principles of democracy 
and of participation of the People in the 
government, for which we proclaim to the World 
the present situation of contained violence that 
exists in our People and that is about to explode 
against these two politicians that had taken by 
assault the power in our Country. Even though in 
Puerto Rico there are no conditions for an armed 
struggle of the People because of the obvious 
disparity of the opposing sides, a revolution of 
cultural and of student affirmation is starting 
to take the streets and to retrieve the spaces 
stolen away by the originators of this coup.

We exhort all communications media of the World 
to divulge and expose the current situation of 
the Puerto Rican Nation and we ask of you, therefore, your total solidarity.

- Composed by Roberto Ramos-Perea, Puertorrican 
playwrite. (With the active collaboration, 
comments and support of more than a hundred Puerto Rican citizens.)




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul  7 10:44:29 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:44:29 -0700
Subject: [News] Charging Wikileaks Source: The Nail in the Coffin of
 Whistblowers
Message-ID: <mailman.62.1278514733.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


Original Content at 
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Charging-Wikileaks-Source-by-Jesselyn-Radack-100707-862.html

----------
July 7, 2010

Charging Wikileaks Source: The Nail in the Coffin of Whistblowers

By Jesselyn Radack

Even the 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/06/AR2010070602330.html>Washington 
Post gets it. In its article on the criminal charges brought against 
Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, the sub-headline to 
the article reads:

U.S. TAKING TOUGH LINE ON LEAKS

The opening paragraph states that the military charging Bradley Manning

is likely to further deter would-be whistleblowers.

I don't care if it's Bush or Obama at the helm. The biggest crimes of 
our generation--torture, warrantless wiretapping, and extraordinary 
rendition--would not have come to light but for the unauthorized 
disclosure of classified information. For the hand-wringing "but we 
can't willy-nilly reveal classified information" crowd, do you think 
Abu Ghraib wasn't classified?
We are told (though there has been not a shred of evidence other than 
the government saying this, and even the charges do not reflect this 
number) that Manning gave some 250,000 classified State Department 
cables to Wikileaks.org. All we really KNOW is that the website 
published a horrific video of an American helicopter massacring 
unarmed Iraqi civilians, including children, and the shooters 
cheering on each other as if it were a video game.

And the former senior National Security Agency (NSA) official Thomas 
Drake? The party line is that he "leaked" classified material to a 
newspaper. If you read the indictment, he has really been indicted 
under the Espionage Act, a 93-year-old law meant to catch spies, for 
allegedly "retaining" classified information. What the government is 
really mad about is that an article appeared in the Baltimore Sun 
describing how and why the NSA opted for an billion-dollar, failed 
invasive surveillance program called "Trailblazer" over one that 
could more adequately collect intelligence information without 
violating people's privacy.

Short of killing someone (think Karen Silkwood, and more recently, of 
the "worldwide manhunt" for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange launched 
by the Pentagon), this is the worst, and increasingly popular, form 
of retaliation that can be taken against a whistleblower: criminal 
prosecution for revealing the truth--which in both the Manning and 
Drake cases did no harm to national security, but instead committed 
the far worse "crime" of embarrassing the government. In fact, both 
these men were trying to expose conduct they thought, and that was, illegal.

I urge you to "like" the 
<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Tom-Drake/128268337206799?v=wall>Save 
Tom Drake page on Facebook and to check out the 
<http://www.bradleymanning.org/>Help Bradley Manning website.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be 
in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
--James Madison

reprinted from <http://jesselyn-radack.dailykos.com/>Dailykos.com 
with author <http://jesselyn-radack.dailykos.com/>permission

Author's Website: http://www.patriotictruthteller.net

Author's Bio: My name is 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesselyn_Radack>Jesselyn Radack and I 
am the former Justice Department ethics attorney and whistleblower in 
the case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. In today's issue of 
The National Law Journal (Feb. 19, 2007), I have an Op-Ed entitled 
"Targeting Lawyers" on what it really looks like when the government 
tries to control attorneys acting on behalf of terrorism suspects 
and, if it cannot control them, punish them. I speak from personal 
experience in being blacklisted by this Administration.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul  7 14:12:52 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:12:52 -0700
Subject: [News] McChrystal Coverup of Special Forces Killings Excluded Key
 Eyewitnesses
Message-ID: <mailman.67.1278526387.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

http://www.counterpunch.org/porter07072010.html

July 7, 2010


"I Saw Them Taking the Bullets Out of the Body of My Daughter"


McChrystal Probe of Special Forces Killings Excluded Key Eyewitnesses

By GARETH PORTER and AHMAD WALID FAZLY

The follow-up investigation of a botched Special 
Operations Forces (SOF) raid in Gardez Feb. 12 
that killed two government officials and three 
women, ordered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal Apr. 
5, was ostensibly aimed at reconciling divergent 
Afghan and U.S. accounts of what happened during and after the raid.

That implied that the U.S. investigators would 
finally do what they had failed to do in the 
original investigation - interview the 
eyewitnesses. But three eyewitnesses who had 
claimed to see U.S. troops digging bullets of the 
bodies of three women told IPS they were never 
contacted by U.S. investigators.

The failure to interview key eyewitnesses, along 
with the refusal to make public any of the 
investigation's findings, continued a pattern of 
behaviour by McChrystal's command of denying that 
the SOF unit had begun a cover-up of the killings immediately after the raid.

Both the original report of the U.S. 
investigation and initial NATO report on the Feb. 
12 night raid in Gardez remain classified, 
according to Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the 
officer who was spokesman for McChrystal on the 
issue before the general was relieved of his command Jun. 23.

Casting further doubt on the integrity of the 
investigation, the officer who carried out the 
follow-up investigation was under McChrystal's 
direct command after completing the investigation.

As a member of the SOF community who had promoted 
night raids as a privileged tactic in his 
strategy in Afghanistan, McChrystal had an 
obvious personal and political interest in 
keeping evidence of an SOF cover-up of the 
killings out of any official U.S. report on the Gardez raid.

Even while claiming that he could not reveal 
anything about the conclusions of the report, 
Breasseale told IPS, "Based on the findings of 
this <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520250044/counterpunchmaga>
[]
investigation, I can reaffirm what I wrote on 5 
April - there is no evidence of a cover-up."

Breasseale had said in an e-mail to us before 
McChrystal was relieved of command that "many" 
survivors of the raid were interviewed, 
"depending on whether they were available to 
speak to the investigating officer".

But the father and mother of an 18-year-old girl 
who died from wounds inflicted by the raiders and 
the brother of the police officer and the 
prosecutor killed in the raid all said in 
interviews last week that they had never been 
contacted by U.S. investigators about what they 
had seen that night. All three gave testimony to the Afghan investigators.

In an interview, Mohammed Tahir, the father of 
Gulalai, the 18-year old girl who was killed in 
the raid, said, "I saw them taking out the 
bullets from bodies of my daughter and others."

Tahir said that he and as many as seven other 
eyewitnesses had told interior ministry 
investigators about the attempted cover-up they 
had seen. But he insisted, "We have never been 
interviewed by the U.S. military."

Mohammed Saber, the brother of the two men killed 
in the raid - Commander Dawood, the head of 
intelligence for a district in Paktia province, 
and Saranwal Zahir, a prosecutor - said he had 
not been interviewed by any U.S. investigator 
either. Saber told IPS, "The Americans were 
taking out the bullets from the bodies of the 
dead with knives and with other equipment that they always have."

Saber said the U.S. soldiers refused to let 
relatives of the victims go to help them as they 
lay bleeding to death. Saber said he and other 
eyewitnesses were taken to a U.S. base and 
detained for three nights and four days.

Sabz Paree, the 18-year-old woman's mother, also 
denied being interviewed by U.S. investigators. 
"I saw everything," she told IPS. "The Americans 
had knives and were taking out the bullets from her."

In response to a request for comment on the 
denials by the three family members that they or 
other eyewitnesses had been interviewed by the 
U.S. investigator, Breasseale wrote in an e-mail, 
"All available family members who offered 
themselves up to take part in the investigator's 
questions when he was there were interviewed during his visit(s)."

Breasseale said the name of the Army colonel in 
charge of the investigation would not be made 
public for reasons of "privacy". He acknowledged 
in an e-mail before McChrystal was relieved of 
duty, however, that the officer was under 
McChrystal's "operational control", although he 
was not at the time he was appointed and during the investigation.

The target of the raid was a young man who had 
been at the celebration at the compound but had 
not even been detained, according to Mohammed 
Saber, who was shown pictures of the target while 
being held in detention for four days. The man 
turned himself in for questioning a few days 
later but was then released without charge, according to Saber.

The International Security Assistance Force 
(ISAF), the combined U.S.-NATO command then 
headed by McChrystal, issued a statement within 
hours of the Feb. 12 raid declaring that the two 
men who died in the raid were "insurgents" who 
had fired on the raiding party, and that the 
troops had found the bodies of three women "tied 
up, gagged and killed" and hidden in a room.

Military officials later suggested that the women 
- who among them had 16 children - had all been 
stabbed to death or had died by other means before the raid.

The officials told reporters the bodies had shown 
signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a 
knife ? a claim that appears to support the 
eyewitness accounts by family members of the use 
of knives by SOF members to dig bullets out of the dead bodies.

The New York Times quoted a family member, Abdul 
Ghafar, as recalling that he had seen bullet 
entry wounds on the bodies of the three dead 
women that appeared to have been scraped out to 
remove bullets. "The holes were bigger than they 
were supposed to be," Gafar was quoted as saying.

When Jerome Starkey of The Times of London 
reported Mar. 13 that more than a dozen people 
interviewed at or near the scene of the attack 
had said the three women were killed by the 
U.S.-NATO gunmen, McChrystal's spokesman, Rear 
Adm. Gregory Smith, tried to challenge the accuracy of Starkey's reporting.

On Apr. 4, ISAF admitted for the first time that 
the woman had been killed as a result of the SOF 
raiders firing on the two men.

However, the ISAF statement suggested that the 
U.S. and Afghan investigators had conducted a 
"thorough joint investigation" and maintained 
that there was no evidence of a cover-up. It 
explained the earlier statement about the women 
being found bound and gagged as the result of "an 
initial report by the international members of 
the joint force who were not familiar with Islamic burial customs".

But the head of the Afghan Interior Ministry's 
Criminal Investigation Department, Mirza Mohammed 
Yarmand, publicly contradicted to the ISAF 
statement, telling the New York Times Apr. 4 that 
his investigators had gotten eyewitness accounts 
from survivors of tampering with the bodies of the dead.

Yarmand told the Times that his investigation had 
concluded that "there was evidence of tampering 
in the corridor inside the compound by the members" of the SOF raiding unit.

Within 24 hours of the publication of Yarmand's 
revelations, McChrystal's spokesman was telling 
reporters that McChrystal had ordered a new U.S. 
investigation, even as he was continuing to deny 
that there any evidence of SOF tampering with the evidence.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and 
journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising 
in U.S. national security policy. The paperback 
edition of his latest book, 
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520250044/counterpunchmaga>Perils 
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to 
War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Ahmad Walid Fazly reported from Kabul.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul  7 19:15:08 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:15:08 -0700
Subject: [News] Activists found not guilty for decommissioning weapons
	factory
Message-ID: <mailman.79.1278544521.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Activists found not guilty for decommissioning weapons factory

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11367.shtml
Chloe Marsh, The Electronic Intifada, 7 July 2010



Seven anti-war activists on trial for entering a 
Brighton weapons factory and "decommissioning" it 
were found unanimously "not guilty" last week.

On 16 January 2009, in the midst of Israel's 
relentless bombing of Gaza, six of the defendants 
broke into the premises of EDO MBM, a supplier of 
weapons components. According to one of the 
defendants, Elijah Smith, they "set out to smash 
it up to the best of our abilities." Two 
activists who supported them outside the factory 
gates were also put on trial for "conspiracy to cause criminal damage"

It was an entirely accountable action which was 
always intended to end in a trial and each 
decommissioner had pre-recorded a video in which 
they stated the reasons for their participation 
-- to help dismantle the war machine from the factory floor.

Once inside the building, the six barricaded 
themselves in and set to work; equipment used to 
make weapon components was trashed and computers, 
filing cabinets and office furnishings were 
thrown out of the windows. Once they were done 
they calmly waited for the police to arrest them. 
All of the defendants have argued that what they 
did was not only morally necessary but crucially, 
that it was legal. UK law allows the commission 
of damage of property to prevent greater crimes.

Two of the accused, Simon Levin and Chris Osmond, 
have extensive experience of working in Palestine 
with the International Solidarity Movement. Chris 
Osmond told the court that "the humanitarian 
disaster unfolding in Gaza at that time meant it 
was imperative to act." He cited the words of 
Rachel Corrie, the US activist who was killed in 
2003 by an Israeli soldier operating a bulldozer 
in Gaza, as an inspiration. The court heard a 
passage of Corrie's diary in which she wrote: 
"I'm witnessing this chronic insidious genocide 
and I'm really scared. This has to stop; I think 
it is a good idea idea for all of us to drop 
everything and devote our lives to making this stop."

During the trial the court heard not only from 
the defendants themselves but from Sharyn Lock, a 
human rights volunteer who was in Gaza during the 
winter 2008-09 attacks. She was inside al-Quds 
hospital in Gaza City when it was attacked with 
white phosphorus. She concluded her evidence by 
saying that she had no doubt that those who armed 
the Israeli Air Force "had the blood of children 
on their hands." The jury saw footage of the air 
attacks on the UN agency for Palestine refugees 
(UNRWA) compound where civilians were sheltering 
and have been given an edited version of the Goldstone report.

Recently-elected member of parliament for the 
local area, Caroline Lucas also gave evidence 
supporting the activists, saying that the 
democratic process "had been exhausted" as far as the factory was concerned.

On 17 January 2009 the bombs had already fallen 
relentlessly on Gaza for three weeks. Massive, 
passionate demonstrations and pickets had been 
held in many cities around the country and the 
world in protest against Israel's war crimes, but 
to no avail. A growing sense of helplessness was 
grabbing hold of the movement as the Palestinian 
body count stood at more than 1,400 and counting. 
Three hundred of the dead were children. It was 
in this context that the "citizens' decommissioning" of EDO MBM/ITT took place.

The arms manufacturer EDO/ITT has been based in 
Brighton since 1946. Acquired along with the rest 
of EDO Corporation by the multinational arms 
conglomerate ITT in December 2007, the company's 
primary business is the manufacture of weapons 
systems such as bomb release mechanisms and bomb 
racks. Crucially, this includes the manufacture 
of the VER-2 Zero Retention Force Arming Unit for 
the Israeli Air Force's F16 war planes.

Over the years EDO has consistently denied 
supplying Israel, and despite more than fifty 
court cases campaigners have not been able to 
properly expose the links between the factory and 
the IAF. However the serious nature of the 
charges against the eight activists (the factory 
sustained nearly ?200,000 -- or $301,600 -- of 
damage and may not have recommenced production 
for weeks) means that for the first time courts 
are taking seriously the argument that EDO's business is fundamentally illegal.

Paul Hills, the managing director of EDO MBM, 
spent his five days on the witness stand at the 
beginning of the trial being confronted with all 
the evidence gathered by campaigners over the 
years exposing a complex network of collaboration 
between British, American and Israeli arms 
companies and the way in which their deals are 
clouded in secrecy. The activists on trial were 
able to present Hills, for the first time, with a 
dossier of evidence showing how EDO MBM uses a 
front company in the US to indirectly supply 
components for F-16 aircraft to Israel. Under UK 
law the supply of weapons components that might 
be used in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip is actually a crime.

After hearing Hills' explanations of his 
company's business practices, Judge George 
Bathurst-Norman said that despite Hill's denials 
of dealing with Israel, it was clear that there 
was enough evidence to justify a genuinely-held 
belief that they did. He also offered the opinion 
that End User Certificates required for arms 
export licenses were "not worth the paper they 
are written on" as they can be easily manipulated.

There is a history of juries in British courts 
finding anti-war activists not guilty when they 
attack machinery used in war crimes. In 1996 four 
women from Trident Ploughshares decommissioned a 
Hawk jet that was about to be shipped to 
Indonesia -- they were found not guilty. In 2008 
the Raytheon 9, who damaged a factory in Derry 
supplying weapons to Israel during the 2006 
Lebanon war, were acquitted by a jury and only 
two weeks ago a group of nine women carrying out 
a similar action at Raytheon during the Gaza 
attacks were also found not guilty by an unanimous jury.

The not guilty verdicts handed down by a jury of 
randomly selected members of the public, will 
make it clear to companies like EDO that not only 
is there a growing number of people who are 
willing to risk their own liberty to stand up for 
the people of Gaza and to challenge Israel's war 
crimes through whatever means possible, but that 
public opinion in the UK is hardening against Israel.

Chloe Marsh is a long-term peace campaigner and 
activist. She has been involved in campaigning 
against the arms trade for many years and 
opposing the illegal wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan, and she's also worked with the 
International Solidarity Movement in Palestine. 
Smash EDO has been campaigning for the closure of 
EDO MBM/ITT for six years. To get involved, 
visit: <http://www.smashedo.org.uk/>www.smashedo.org.uk



Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul  8 15:59:40 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:59:40 -0700
Subject: [News] Remembering Lumumba
Message-ID: <mailman.99.1278619201.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Remembering Lumumba



Mwaura Kaara
2010-07-08, Issue <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/489>489

<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/65781>http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/65781


As the DRC commemorates 50 years of independence, 
Mwaura Kaara finds there?s little official 
acknowledgement of the life of Patrice Lumumba, 
Congo?s first and only elected prime minister, 
removed from office after two months and 
eventually assassinated. The celebration ?should 
have reflected on Lumumba?s main contribution to 
the Congolese struggle?, writes Kaara, ?his 
articulation of the idea of a united Congo, a 
vision that sought to build a united nations 
across all ethnic and tribal divisions despite fierce European opposition.?

On 17 January 1961 Patrice Lumumba, the 
charismatic first and only elected prime minister 
of Congo, was brutally murdered. The 
circumstances of his death remain a mystery, the 
identity of his killers unknown.

In 1956 Lumumba was a post office clerk; four 
years later he would be prime minister. In 
between he had been an ??volu?? ? one of Congo's 
tiny black middle class, a beer salesman and a 
prisoner, twice for his political motivation.

His imprisonment radicalised him and by 1958 he 
had co-founded a political party, the National 
Congolese Movement, the MNC that was distinctively pan-Africanist.

Independence Day was celebrated on 30 June in a 
ceremony attended by many dignitaries including 
King Baudouin and the foreign dignitaries and 
press. Patrice Lumumba delivered his famous 
independence speech after being officially 
excluded from the event programme, despite being 
the new prime minister. The speech of King 
Baudouin praised developments under colonialism, 
his reference to the ?genius? of his great 
grand-uncle Leopold II of Belgium glossing over 
atrocities committed during the Congo Free State.

The King continued, ?Don't compromise the future 
with hasty reforms, and don't replace the 
structures that Belgium hands over to you until 
you are sure you can do better... Don't be afraid 
to come to us. We will remain by your side, give you advice.?

In his speech, addressed directly to Belgium?s 
monarch and ministers, Lumumba reclaimed the 
history and dignity of the Congolese people in 
their decades-long struggle for independence:

?For this independence of the Congo 
 no 
Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to 
forget that it was by fighting that it has been 
won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic 
fight, a fight in which we were spared neither 
privation nor suffering, and for which we gave 
our strength and our blood 
 We are proud of this 
struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the 
depths of our being, for it was a noble and just 
struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the 
humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.?

Lumumba was prime minister for only about two 
months before he was removed illegally from 
office and eventually killed. This occurred under 
the auspices and coordination of a section of the 
United Nations loyal to the Belgian government, 
the Belgian authorities and the US Central Intelligence Agency.

On 11 July 1960, the resource-rich Katanga 
province announced it was seceding under the 
leadership of Moise Tshombe. Belgium?s troops 
promptly entered in support. This move provoked a 
wave of international outrage, in particular 
criticism by the socialist bloc, spearheaded by 
the Soviet Union, and the decolonising nations in 
Africa and Asia. The Belgians withdrew in favour 
of UN troops, but the UN did not nullify 
Tshombe?s secession. Prime Minister Lumumba 
appealed to the UN and United States, but the 
imperialist powers turned a deaf ear to the new 
African leader. He turned to the Soviet Union, 
which provided loyal forces with aid and 
transported troops to help end the secession.

On 5 September, the pro-imperialist president, 
Kasavubu, illegally removed Lumumba from office. 
Lumumba brought his case directly to the 
parliament, which reaffirmed his post. In 
response, Kasavubu dismissed the parliament.

UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjold publicly 
endorsed Kasavubu?s move. A section of the UN 
forces loyal to the Belgian government had 
earlier hampered Lumumba by closing a radio 
station he was using to plead his case with the 
people. Amid the struggle, Colonel Joseph Mobutu 
took power in a CIA-backed coup d??tat on the 
side of Kasavubu and the United States. Lumumba 
was placed under house arrest, ?protected? by UN 
troops actively intervening against his rule.

Lumumba understood that the UN was acting as the 
armed forces of the Western imperialist powers. 
Rather than stay under house arrest, he decided 
to flee. As he was fleeing, he was captured by 
Mobutu?s forces on 1 December 1960. Mobutu handed 
over Lumumba to the secessionist Tshombe, who had 
him executed on the very night of his capture. 
The whole capture by Mobutu and turnover to 
Tshombe was orchestrated by Belgian authorities 
with the full knowledge and aid of the CIA.

Mobutu gained in power under the new government, 
eventually ruling as a brutal dictator with the 
support of US imperialism until he was ousted in 1997.

This year, the Democratic Republic of Congo has 
celebrated 50 years of independence, and amidst 
the noise and cacophony, the name of one of 
Africa?s greatest ancestor and his significant 
contributions to the African liberation movement has gone silent.

The meaning of the life and the work of Patrice 
Lumumba was rooted in his determination to fight 
against the forces of domination and oppression, 
that were represented by the European world in 
the most turbulent period of the history of the 
Congo, and as such as the Democratic Republic of 
Congo held festivities to mark 50 years of 
independence and symbolically usher in a new era 
breathing in new ethos and values, focus should 
have been to reflect on the steadfast efforts of 
Lumumba in his quest for the real movement of the people of Africa.

The celebration should have been to reflect on 
Lumumba?s main contribution to the Congolese 
struggle, his articulation of the idea of a 
united Congo, a vision that sought to build a 
united nations across all ethnic and tribal 
divisions despite fierce European opposition. A 
vision that paralleled his Pan-African sentiment 
of African unity, both ideals that were 
unacceptable to the imperialist powers, which 
sought a Congo and Africa riven with internal 
strife in order to be held in submission.

As the political elite in the Democratic Republic 
of Congo continue to suffer from the hangover of 
toasting with their Belgian masters, after their 
heavy indulgence, and celebrations marked by the 
entertainment parading of their poverty-stricken 
populace, who could not comprehend what was 
happening, let us reflect on and walk the legacy 
of Patrice Lumumba. A legacy reflected in the 
pan-African aims, institutions and policies of 
the African Union and in the guiding ethos behind 
the adoption of the Ezulwini Consensus, which 
proposes a permanent African seat in a reformed 
United Nations Security Council.

His ability to evoke so powerfully the extent of 
his people?s subjugation, derived from a rare 
understanding of the inherent duplicity of the 
colonial discourse. As Jean Van Lierde put it:

?He was the only Congolese leader who rose above 
the ethnic difficulties and tribal preoccupations 
that destroyed all the other parties. Lumumba was the first real pan-African.?

Shortly before his assassination, Lumumba penned 
the following words in a farewell letter: ?The 
only thing we wanted for our country was the 
right to a decent existence, to dignity without 
hypocrisy, to independence without 
restrictions... The day will come when history will have its say.?

In conclusion, we can say that the external 
enemies, (or the enemies from without), and 
internal enemies (or the enemies from within), 
led to the demise and death of Patrice Lumumba. 
But, fortunately, his legacy lives on.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Mwaura Kaara is the youth focal point at United 
Nations Millennium Campaign, Africa.
* Please send comments to 
<mailto:editor at pambazuka.org>editor at pambazuka.org 
or comment online at <http://www.pambazuka.org/>Pambazuka News.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  9 12:41:54 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:41:54 -0700
Subject: [News] Confronting Rendition to Torture in North Carolina
Message-ID: <mailman.106.1278693722.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Confronting Rendition to Torture in North Carolina

By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/clarehanrahan>Clare Hanrahan

Source: WarIsACrime.org
http://www.zcommunications.org/confronting-rendition-to-torture-in-north-carolina-by-clare-hanrahan
Friday, July 09, 2010


Despite what our leaders may profess, U.S. 
directed torture continues and efforts to obtain 
redress for victims and accountability from 
perpetrators are met with systematic obstruction. 
We know we cannot rely on government, at any 
level, to take the initiative for accountability.

But we must not be bystanders.

Six years have passed since the release of the 
gruesome photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, and it 
is well past the deadline President Obama set for 
closing the prison camps at Guantanamo. Yet this 
Administration has steadfastly refused to seek 
accountability for U.S.-sponsored torture?the 
murderous extent of which is still being 
revealed?and invokes the ?state secrets? 
privilege to obstruct prosecution when torture 
victims, some released without charge, seek legal redress.

These issues are never easy to confront. They 
require us to break through our denial, take in 
the horror, and hold it in awareness while we organize for action.

In a 2006 report, The Parliamentary Assembly of 
the Council of Europe (PACE) accused the United 
States of operating a ?clandestine ?spiderweb? of 
disappearances, secret detentions and unlawful 
inter-state transfers, often encompassing 
countries notorious for their use of torture. 
Hundreds of persons have become entrapped in this 
web?some merely suspected of sympathizing with a 
presumed terrorist organization.?

In North Carolina, a tenacious grassroots 
coalition of peace and human rights activists, 
religious groups, and courageous locals has 
organized as NC Stop Torture Now (NC-STN). 
According to the group, ?Officials of the Bush 
Administration used North Carolina as a key part 
of their secret off-shore torture program.? The 
?torture taxi? planes were based in Johnston and 
Lenoir counties. Their pilots and crews work for 
Aero Contractors, a CIA linked company 
headquartered at the Johnston County airport in 
Smithfield, a town of less than 12,000 persons 
situated in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina about 30 miles east of Raleigh.

NC Stop Torture Now has been campaigning since 
2005 at local, state, and federal levels for an 
end to the practice of extraordinary rendition to 
torture and for an investigation of Aero 
Contractors. They act boldly and deftly to 
educate the public and state officials. They seek 
acknowledgment and accountability for the crimes, 
apology and restitution for torture survivors, 
and assurance that state and national resources 
will never again be used to secretly disappear 
people and torture them, whether they are guilty of crimes or not.

The U.N. Convention against Torture, ratified by 
the U.S.in 1994, requires in Article III: ?No 
state shall expel, return or extradite a person 
to another state where there are substantial 
grounds for believing that he would be in danger 
of being subjected to torture.? Failure to 
prosecute violations is considered a breach of 
international law. North Carolina law requires 
anyone in charge of a state agency, such as the 
Global TransPark where Aero maintained a hangar 
in Kinston, to report possible criminal 
violations to the State Bureau of Investigation.

NC-STN was pivotal in organizing a public 
conference, ?Weaving a Net of Accountability: 
Taking on Extraordinary Rendition at the State 
and Regional Level,? held April 8-9 at Duke 
University. Speakers came from Ireland, London, 
New York, Washington, Boston, and from throughout North Carolina.

?It is clear that our public taxpayer-funded 
airports are systematically being used by the CIA 
for purposes that may in fact still include 
extraordinary rendition,? said Christina Cowger, 
a conference organizer and facilitator with 
NC-STN. Aero Contractors was founded in 1979 in 
the wake of the dismantling of Air America, the 
CIA airline that participated heavily in the Indo-China wars, she said.

?It was actually the St. Louis folks who woke us 
up to the fact that we had this CIA operation in 
our backyard,? Cowger acknowledged. A delegation 
from St. Louis including longtime human rights 
activist and war-tax resister Bill Ramsey and his 
friend, Andrew Wimmer, traveled to North Carolina in November 2005.

The group joined with local members of NC-STN and 
served a peoples? indictment to Aero Contractors, 
charging them with multiple counts of violation 
of U.S. and international laws and treaties 
banning torture by providing pilots and planes 
for the CIA?s program of extraordinary rendition. 
The citizen action resulted in 14 arrests?not of 
the officials who are complicit in rendition to 
torture, but of the activists who came to seek accountability.

Wimmer was working then with the St. Louis-based 
Center for Theology and Social Analysis. His 
research on extraordinary rendition led to Global 
TransPark, a public-private consortium built by 
the state of North Carolina with economic development funds.

According to Cowger, UK journalist Stephen Grey 
used flight logs from the FAA and Eurocontrol 
(the FAA?s counterpart in Europe) to piece 
together the itineraries of the two main 
rendition planes, the Kinston-based N313P and the 
smaller Gulfstream, N379P, which was based at the 
Johnston County airport. Tail numbers have since 
been changed. A Montana-registered Gulfstream IV 
aircraft, with tail number N478GS, operated by 
Centurian Aviation, was based at the Fayetteville 
Airport, and is suspected of facilitating the 
extraordinary rendition program, according to 
Cowger, as an arm of the Joint Special Operations 
Command (JSOC), based at Fort Bragg.

?The point is really a simple one,? said Robin 
Kirk, director of the Human Rights Center at Duke 
University, in introducing Gavin Simpson, lead 
investigator with the Council of Europe and 
conference presenter. ?We are trying to do 
something about human rights abuse, extraordinary 
rendition, and the torture that came along with 
it that has its feet in our state
to get around 
the impunity that seems to be reigning right now 
with regard to human rights issues.?

The Council of Europe serves its 46 member states 
as ?the guardian for human rights, democracy, and 
respect for the rule of law in Europe,? using as 
its reference point the European Convention on Human Rights.

Aero Contractors was the aviation ?hub? of the 
CIA?s rendition program, which ?flew dozens of 
people to horrific jails around the globe, using 
?civilian? aircraft,? according to NC Stop 
Torture Now. The group has compiled a partial 
list of twenty-four detainees secretly 
transported by Aero Contractors for torture by or 
for the CIA, citing as a primary source the book Ghost Plane by Stephen Grey.

The pickup methodology for the CIA?s torture 
rendition flights was ?alarmingly systematized,? 
said Simpson, who has followed the gruesome trail 
of so-called ?extraordinary rendition? throughout 
Europe. ?It involved stripping the suspect naked, 
often roughly beating him around the midriff and 
the ribs in the process. Men clad in ninja suits, 
black balaclavas, tight fitting black 
coats?unidentifiable from one another and without 
speaking a single word?would then put this person 
through a process of shackling, handcuffing
.? 
Simpson said that the captors would administer 
sedatives, often via the rectum, and blindfold, 
earmuff, goggle, and hood the captives. They 
would place the prisoners in adult diapers, and 
then put them in jumpsuits or other rudimentary 
clothing. Finally they were ?bundled onto a 
rendition aircraft, shackled to the ground or a 
gurney, sometimes given further sedatives so that 
they wouldn?t experience the flight, and then 
flown to a fate and a destination unknown.?

?Aero Contractors personnel on the aircraft were 
the ones who actually operated the rendition 
circuits. Without their personal participation, 
none of this would have been possible. They were 
the pilots in command. They were the support 
crew. They were the persons who held the controls 
of the aircraft and navigated them to landings at 
the black sites air [fields] with detainees bound 
and shackled in the back. Aero personnel were 
part of the systematic cover-up. For example, the 
pilots in command knowingly deviated from 
registered flight plans, willfully therefore 
violating the regulations of international 
aviation law and assuring that their operations 
could not be traced contemporaneously and have 
been mighty hard to track retrospectively,? Simpson said.

Aero Contractors employed about 80 persons toward 
the start of the Bush war on terror. Now it?s up 
to about 130 employees. ?We are under no illusion 
that people like these are the authors of the 
policy. They are the foot soldiers,? Cowger 
asserted. ?These people live and work in Johnston 
County in comfortable middle class houses.?

In May 2010, the Attorney General of Spain 
requested that a Spanish judge issue arrest 
warrants for 13 U.S. citizens who helped kidnap 
and disappear German citizen Khaled el-Masri as 
part of the Bush Administration?s program of 
extraordinary rendition. At least three of the 
U.S. citizens are pilots employed by Aero Contractors.

Allyson Caison, a Johnston County-based real 
estate broker, has been involved in NC-STN since 
its inception. ?When in 2005 we got a notice that 
the folks from St. Louis were coming and were 
going to tell us what the CIA was doing,? the 
former PTA president told the assembly, ?I went 
to the meeting to see what was going on.? Caison 
says she was shocked to find that the people 
involved with Aero Contractors were ?the pillars 
of our community...very well-enmeshed in society. 
So in speaking out against them, we are not 
speaking out against some abstract person; we?re 
speaking out against our neighbors.?

Confronting these issues is not easy. It takes 
courage. It takes persistence. It takes fortitude.

But we must not be bystanders.

Chuck Fager, director of Quaker House, in 
Fayetteville, NC, is active with NC-STN in their 
persistent lobbying efforts before the Johnston 
County Board of Commissioners.?They are all 
Republicans and the ones up for re-election are 
running unopposed,? he said at the Duke 
conference. ?After 14 months or so, we are 
establishing a relationship with these 
commissioners
month after month after month we go 
back. Building these types of connections is very important.?

Fager and I later talked about how difficult it 
is to face up to the issue of U.S. directed 
torture. ?All the dots connected in my back 
yard,? he said. ?It?s like waking up one morning 
and realizing you live next to SS headquarters.?

Recalling the June 2006 Quaker conference on 
torture held in Greensboro, NC, he admitted that 
listening was ?very hard. It made me shake. I 
couldn?t sleep very well. I moved to a different 
level
my ability to keep it [torture] far away 
has been eroded. The levels of denial are really deep.?

Robin Kirk, in her opening remarks at the 
conference said, ?We have to do this work where 
we live. We have to do this
to show our neighbors 
and colleagues and school teachers and grocery 
clerks and businessmen and soldiers, why human 
rights matter.? Kirk spent years working in Peru 
and Colombia documenting human rights abuses, and 
authored several reports for Human Rights Watch.

In his keynote address, Scott Horton, a 
contributing editor with Harper?s Magazine, 
detailed some of the findings of his 
investigation of the sudden and violent deaths of 
three prisoners at Camp Delta?the 
?extra-constitutional? prison camp at Guantanamo 
Naval Base. In a March 2010 Harper?s Magazine 
report, Horton wrote of evidence ?that suggests 
the current administration failed to investigate 
seriously?and may even have continued?a cover-up 
of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006.?

?When the last prisoner is departed from that 
area of the American enclave on the island of 
Cuba, the book on Guantanamo is going to be far 
from closed,? Horton told the Duke assembly that 
drew about 120 people throughout the weekend. 
?Most of the legacy of Guantanamo remains in 
place, untouched, and there is as yet no real 
basis to assume there will be any kind of 
accountability,? he said. ?Ideas linked to 
Guantanamo are being woven into the fabric of our 
national security state. These transformations 
are going on in the policy background in 
Washington with surprisingly little attention.?

And the horrid revelations continue.

Stephen Soldz, a co-founder of the Coalition for 
an Ethical Psychology, which has made 
international news with its campaign to challenge 
the participation of leaders in the American 
Psychological Association in interrogation and 
torture, provided the Duke conference with 
insight into the psychology of denial and 
accountability. Soldz is president-elect of 
Psychologists for Social Responsibility and 
coauthor of a report just released by Physicians 
for Human Rights. The report, ?Experiments in 
Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and 
Experimentation in the ?Enhanced? Interrogation 
Program,? he contends, ?confirms previous 
suspicions and provides the first strong evidence 
that the CIA was indeed engaged in illegal and 
unethical research on detainees in its custody.?

Steve Watt, senior staff attorney with the ACLU 
Human Rights Program, spoke of the ongoing legal 
challenges to the CIA?s extraordinary rendition 
program. Noting the ?significant legal 
impediments? to obtaining judicial remedy, he 
said ?It is all but certain that a fully-fledged 
trial of a lawsuit brought by rendition survivors 
is many, many years away.? With a nod to NC-STN 
activist Peggy Misch, Watt told the Duke 
conference ?NC Stop Torture Now is one of the 
most innovative and creative grassroots groups 
working on torture in this country.?

Just prior to the Duke conference, Dr. Edward 
Horgan, a former Irish Defence Forces officer and 
co-founder of Shannon Watch, had his 10-year visa 
revoked by the U.S. State Department. After much 
pressure in the Irish press and from U.S. allies, 
including Veterans for Peace, at the last minute 
Dr. Horgan, who is also the International 
Secretary of the Irish Peace and Neutrality 
Alliance, was allowed travel to the U.S.

Ireland has been a neutral state since its 
inception, Horgan told the assembly. Over one 
million U.S. troops have passed through Shannon 
since 2002. ?Three plane loads a day, at least, 
each bringing about 200 troops?so 500 or 600 
armed troops pass through Shannon airport every 
day of the week, every day of the year, in gross 
violation of international law on neutrality.?

?Clearly torture is a serious crime. But it is 
connected with the two wars [Afghanistan and 
Iraq],? Horgan continued. ?By torturing somebody 
you are removing some of their human rights, 
albeit very seriously and very grossly. By 
killing somebody you are removing all of their 
human rights. You are removing their very 
existence. Killing or causing the deaths, 
directly or indirectly, of one million people, 
and killing 200,000 children, or causing their 
deaths, [in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan] is 
absolutely a gross crime against humanity, regardless of who does it.?

?Kidnap, rendition and torture of U.S. enemies is 
now being replaced with extra-judicial killings 
and assassinations of U.S. enemies. Collateral 
damage, including the killing of thousands of 
innocent foreign civilians, is now acceptable to 
the U.S.,? Horgan said. ?Obama has ordered a 
dramatic increase in the U.S. drone attacks. 

These extrajudicial killings are being passed 
off as being part of the war on terror, a 
necessary evil. But killing someone, 
extra-judicially or otherwise, but unjustifiably, 
is even a more serious crime than torture.?

?I can speak all you want about all the bad 
things that have happened to myself and others,? 
Bisher al-Rawi told the assembly, speaking on 
live video from his home in London. Al-Rawi was 
imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured at two 
separate CIA facilities in Afghanistan, then 
transferred, via Aero Contractors, to Guantanamo 
in 2003 and released without charges in 2007. 
?Whether beatings, the pains, or the shivering 
cold, or people screaming because nobody is 
giving them the medication, or people screaming 
because they are being beaten up, whatever, I can 
go on with all of that. But I think, on top of 
that, we should look to the future, we should 
look at how we can actually do something positive 
to build these lives, these lives that have been 
destroyed
 I take this very close to my heart and 
I have decided this is really my work in life for 
the time being, until the time when we no longer 
have to speak about these things. 
I hope that will happen before too long.?

But we must not be bystanders.

##

Clare Hanrahan is a contributing editor to War 
Crimes Times, an associate member of Veterans For 
Peace Chapter 099, member of the National War Tax 
Resistance Coordinating Committee, and an organizer with WRL Asheville.




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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  9 12:45:21 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:45:21 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Argentina=2C_Maradona=2C_World_Cup=3A_It=92?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?s_More__Than_Football?=
Message-ID: <mailman.111.1278693926.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Argentina, Maradona, World Cup: It?s More Than Football

By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/supriyochatterjee>Supriyo Chatterjee
http://www.zcommunications.org/argentina-maradona-world-cup-it-s-more-than-football-by-supriyo-chatterjee

Friday, July 09, 2010

The four German goals that destroyed Argentina?s 
dream of winning the football World Cup this year 
rekindled another: that of the Argentine Right 
and its sinister pointsman, Mauricio Macri. The 
real target of the Argentine Right and its 
allied  ?media generals?, as President Cristina 
Fern?ndes calls them, is Diego Maradona, revered 
in Argentina for his football achievements and 
for his political journey to the Left.

Maradona has since resigned as the team?s 
technical director and the Clar?n, the 
unforgiving Right-wing rag, started ripping into 
him. However, the people turned up in thousands 
to cheer the return of the defeated team with two 
slogans to chill the Right's ardour. The first, 
'he who does not jump is English', was a 
throwback to the celebrations of the 1986 victory 
over England in which Maradona entered 
Argentinean legend as a cheeky devil with his 
first, handball goal and as a demi-god with his 
second solo effort, accepted by most people as 
the best World Cup goal. It was seen as revenge 
for defeat in the Malvinas. The second rallying 
cry, 'uh-ah, Maradona no se va' (Maradona's not 
going away), was borrowed from the Venezuelan 
Ch?vez supporters, of whom Maradona is one.

The President invited the team to the 
presidential palace. The team led by Maradona 
said they were not worthy of the honour. Holding 
back her tears, Cristina Fern?ndes said they were 
mistaken, they were indeed worthy of it. All this 
might seem melodramatic to outsiders but 
Argentineans live and breathe the game. What 
Eduardo Galeano said of the Uruguayans holds true 
of the neighbouring Argentineans, that they are 
suckers for the beautiful game and are born 
shouting goooaaal. As it happens, Clar?n's owner 
was away from the country when the team returned, 
reportedly in the USA, escaping it seems from the 
revelation that her sons were adopted during the 
military dictatorship (1976-1983), brothers whose 
parents were murdered by the military regime. 
President Fern?ndez forced the Argentine Football 
Association to make sure that the World Cup 
matches were accessible to all rather than the 
pay-per-game scheme which would have translated 
into millions of dollars in profit for the Clarin 
media group. Ever since, they have had the 
President and the "golden kid" in their sights.

Mauricio Macri's father, who established himself 
as a fabulously wealthy businessman, made most of 
his money during the dictatorship years. Mauricio 
apparently decided to take to politics while he 
was briefly kidnapped and held for ransom by a 
group of policemen. His family is said to have 
paid a huge fortune for his release. Mauricio 
took over the Boca Juniors football club, where 
Maradona made his name as a precocious youngster 
and a senior player who would not go to the 
rival, well-heeled River Plate for more money. 
Mauricio stabilised the club and this paid him 
political dividends. He was elected Mayor of 
Buenos Aires with most votes coming not only from 
the fashionable neighbourhoods but also the 
poorer parts where most Boca supporters live. As 
the Buenos Aires Mayor, Macri has given early 
hint of what his rule could be like. He has 
unleashed violent police crackdown on 
demonstrations, spied on his rivals and 
colleagues using the capital's notorious police 
force, brought in ex-FBI advisors for them, stood 
by wealthy residents who tried to erect walls to 
keep out the poor from sight, and recently 
admitted that he made some appointments based on 
advice from the CIA and Mossad. Maradona?s Left 
turn imperils the Macri project of becoming 
Argentina's next President on the lines of 
Chile's billionaire President Pi?era. Diego has 
defended Cristina Fern?ndes, who lacks her 
husband, the former President Nestor Kirchner's popularity.

World Cups hold bittersweet memories for 
Argentineans. The 1986 victory in Mexico gave 
them Maradona. The first time they held the Jules 
Rimet trophy was in 1978. The country was then 
ruled by a military dictatorship and dissidents 
were being held and killed a thousand metres away 
from the main stadium. The River Plate stadium 
was being used as a clandestine holding centre. 
Even today, a bad football game in the continent 
is known as a ?Pinochet?, filling up a football 
stadium for a horror show. Argentina's Dutch 
rivals in the finals were advised not to go. They 
and the others did and the military used the 
victory for its counter-human rights campaign 
with the slogan, ?Argentineans are right and 
human?. General Jorge Rafael Videla, the 
architect of the dirty war, is on trial now. His 
policy of making people "disappear" (the 
disappeared were neither dead nor living, he 
clarified at his first trial, they had merely 
dis-a-ppeared) has become a template for the 
coupsters of Latin America. The Dutch crown 
princess, born M?xima Zorreguieta in Buenos 
Aires, is the daughter of the Agriculture 
Minister during the dictatorship and holds dual Dutch-Argentinean citizenship.

In 1978, Juan then 22, was transferred together 
with 15 other political prisoners from the Sierra 
Chica jail to the concentration camp of La Perla 
in C?rdoba as hostages to be executed if 
guerrillas committed any attack during the World 
Cup. That group of 16 was kept for the period of 
the championship handcuffed behind their back, 
blindfolded, seated on the floor against the wall 
but with a rare privilege: if Argentina played, 
their guards handcuffed them in front so they 
could celebrate and wave them about when the team 
scored (which they heard over the radio). In June 
1978, Ernesto, then 23 and political prisoner in 
Magdelana jail, was taken out of his cell during 
the night, beaten to pulp with sticks, made to 
bath in freezing water and put through several 
mock executions and later thrown into a 
punishment cell where he stayed squatting for ten 
days because it was too small for him to stand 
up. From that cell, Ernesto heard the cheers of 
the hangmen each time that Mario Kempes tore 
through the other team. Ernesto also celebrated 
but sensed that each Argentine goal could prolong 
his captivity. It was only years later that they 
saw the famous photos of the military junta 
celebrating the title in the palace and 
remembered those goals that they celebrated, and 
suffered, in the darkness of their dungeons.

The Instituto Espacio para la Memoria (Space for 
Memory Institute) tried to heal the wound between 
the footballers who won the Cup and the victims 
of the military regime by hosting the "Other 
Final" in 2008. Among those players present were 
Luque, Villa and Houseman who, like a large part 
of Argentine society, were unaware of the 
magnitude of the massacres. Some of the players 
did not join that act, and indeed criticised it, 
while the then coach, Menotti, stayed away. 
Medals were handed over to the participants 
saying: ?In recognition of your participation in 
the ?Other Final?. The match for life and human 
rights.? Houseman shed tears, Luque was 
noticeably emotional and Villa, pioneer in 
recognising that horror, was at all the 
microphones. Joaqu?n, Manuel and Sebasti?n, 
children of Ernesto and Juan, had their Argentine 
shirts signed by the players. Before travelling 
to Cape Town, this Argentinean team had 
themselves photographed holding a huge banner 
saying, 'We support the Mothers of the Plaza (a 
group of women who stood up to the dictatorship) 
for the Nobel Peace Prize'. Would that have been 
possible without Maradona's consent?

Maradona turned to the Left during his worst 
personal crisis while battling a drug addiction. 
He travelled to a detoxification clinic in Cuba 
and Fidel Castro mentored him at that time. 
Today, Maradona sports a Che tattoo on his arm 
and one of Fidel in his calve. The "golden kid" 
was an iconic presence at the 2005 demonstrations 
at Mar del Plata, where he sported a George Bush 
war criminal tee shirt and called him human 
garbage. One of those present at that 
demonstration was a Boca Junior fan who had 
always dreamt of meeting Maradona -- Evo Morales, 
now the Bolivian President. Maradona might not be 
all that stands between the Argentinean Right and 
a presidential victory but "el diez" (the perfect 
one in reference to his No 10 shirt), warts and 
all, is part of the Argentine, Latin American and 
international Left. Even English socialists must feel like jumping at this.

More Latin America reports at 
<http://nuestrosricos.blogspot.com/>Meeting Point 
(http://nuestrosricos.blogspot.com/)




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  9 17:32:43 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:32:43 -0700
Subject: [News] California dockworkers reject meeting with Israeli consul
Message-ID: <mailman.127.1278711171.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

California dockworkers reject meeting with Israeli consul

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11384.shtml
Report, The Electronic Intifada, 9 July 2010

[]

Picketers at the Port of Oakland prevent the unloading of goods from 
an Israeli ship on 20 June 2010. (Bill Hackwell)

Two weeks after the International Longshore and Warehouse Union 
(ILWU) in the San Francisco Bay Area joined with activists at the 
Port of Oakland 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11348.shtml>to block the 
unloading of an Israeli Zim Lines cargo ship, the union reaffirmed 
its support of Palestinian rights despite pressure from the Israeli 
consulate and the Zionist-Israeli organization Stand With Us.

On 6 July, a group representing the Israeli consulate and Stand With 
Us attempted to pressure the ILWU Local 10 into withdrawing its 
protest of Israel's 31 May attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and 
its condemnation of the Gaza siege and wall in the West Bank. The 
groups had asked to address the ILWU Local 10's Executive Board at 
their regular meeting.

However, the local union members were not easily persuaded, and 
denied permission for the Israeli delegation to attend their meeting, 
according to a press release issued by Labor for Palestine (US) 
("<http://www.laborforpalestine.net/wp/2010/07/08/oakland-dockers-stand-firm-as-israeli-consul-seeks-an-audience/>Oakland 
dockers stand firm as Israeli Consul seeks an audience," 7 July 2010).

The local's rejection of the meeting follows a request sent by the 
Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) to the ILWU 
Local 10 Executive board, praising the union's historic action at the 
Port of Oakland on 20 June. The Palestinian trade union leaders also 
expressed deep concern that the Israeli consulate would command a 
meeting with the union in an attempt to coerce members out of their 
political stance on Palestinian human rights.

"Although we do not live in the United States, we find it highly 
unusual and somewhat uncustomary that a paid foreign representative 
of a racist and apartheid regime can demand and get a meeting with 
the executive board of a local union no less than the ILWU," stated the PGFTU.

"We humbly ask of you to hold steadfast in the face of backlash and 
revenge against your union. The call for a meeting with your union by 
a foreign paid emissary is intervening in the domestic affairs of 
local community grassroots action in the United States. Israel, an 
apartheid state, maintaining an illegal war against our people, 
should not be given the platform at your union house. That platform 
should be reserved for heroes who champion justice and equality for 
all. Please ask Mr. Tor to end his government's criminal actions and 
answer for the 40,000 people Israel killed during the multiple 
invasions and occupations of Lebanon, the massacres of Deir Yassin, 
Qibya, Sabra and Shatila, Jenin and Gaza. Like the Turkish nationals 
[killed on 31 May], the fallen have names, lives and families and 
worked in the most destitute of conditions. Our mission, like yours, 
is to bring dignity to our working people."



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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  9 17:53:03 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:53:03 -0700
Subject: [News] Oil Spill Devastates Amazon Region in Peru
Message-ID: <mailman.130.1278712385.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Oil Spill Devastates Amazon Region in Peru

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/2582-oil-spill-devastates-amazon-region-in-peru
Written by David Hill
Wednesday, 07 July 2010 12:24


On June 19 hundreds of barrels of oil were 
spilled in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon, 
leading to calls for a ?state of emergency? to be 
declared and an appeal to the United Nations to intervene.

The oil was spilled by Argentine company 
Pluspetrol on the River Maranon in Loreto, 
northern Peru. This is far from the first time. 
According to a June 25 article in the Peruvian 
weekly 
<http://www.hildebrandtensustrece.com/index.html>Hildebrandt 
en sus trece, the same company has spilled oil 78 
times in the last four years in this region: four 
spills in 2006, 23 in 2007, 18 in 2008, 23 in 2009, and 10 this year already.

?We went down to the river to do our washing and 
realised there were traces of oil in the water. 
That was a shock. We went a little further along 
the bank and soon realised that there were 
patches of oil everywhere in the river,? said one 
local resident in an interview with radio station 
La Voz de la Selva, which has followed events closely.

Local reaction has centred on two main concerns. 
First, the fact that so many people rely on the 
river for their survival. According to leading 
indigenous organization 
<http://www.aidesep.org.pe/>Asociaci?n 
Inter?tnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana 
(AIDESEP), at least 28 indigenous communities - 
in other words, thousands of people - use the 
river for their drinking water, cooking and fishing.

Second, the fact that Pluspetrol?s and the 
Peruvian authorities? response to the spill was 
so patently inadequate. A statement from a 
coalition of local organizations accused 
Pluspetrol of failing to act quickly enough, and 
Peru?s Energy Ministry of playing down the 
gravity of the spill. ?It?s not like the Gulf of 
Mexico,? the Energy Minister was quoted as saying.

Tragically, this is nothing new in northern Peru 
where 
<http://www.earthrights.org/publication/legacy-harm>oil 
has devastated indigenous land and lives for 
decades. On the River Corrientes, Amazon Watch, 
Earthrights International and Peruvian NGO 
Racimos de Ungurahui estimate that nine billion 
barrels of toxic waste have been dumped into 
streams and wetlands since the 1970s.

"On the international news the Gulf spill is 
priority news. Presidents of governments and 
multinationals speak about the BP disaster, but 
nobody is talking about the damage suffered by 
our river and communities," said the 
<http://www.redambientalloretana.org/>Loreto 
Environmental Network (RAL), a local 
environmental watchdog based in Iquitos, the biggest town in the region.

Worse, speaking out against this damage makes you 
enemies. Peru?s Minister of the Interior decided 
to 
<http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/6176>expel 
Paul McAuley, president of the RAL. McAuley has 
been a fierce critic of environmenta and human 
rights abuses in northern Peru for years. In 
response 
<http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/missionary-defending-amazon-tribes-peru-must-not-be-deported-2010-07-07>Amnesty 
International has called on the Peruvian government to reverse its decision.

?The government?s attitude towards Indigenous 
people and those who work to protect their rights 
is deeply disturbing,? said Guadalupe Marengo, 
Deputy Americas Director at Amnesty 
International. ?This attempt to expel a human 
rights advocate who has worked tirelessly to 
protect Amazon communities and their environment 
is the latest example of the attack on Indigenous 
People?s rights that is taking place in Peru.?

McAuley, who has lived in Peru for 20 years and 
who faces deportation today, said "What we do at 
the Loreto Environmental Network is 
awareness-raising so that biodiversity is treated 
legally and responsibly. To some people that 
seems to be a threat, or contrary to public 
order. Our work is to educate people."
These are grim times in Peru. Since the 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/1895-50-days-of-protest-and-one-massacre-in-the-peruvian-amazon>tragic 
violence at Bagua last year, when armed 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/1896-massacre-in-peru-photo-essay-and-dispatch-on-the-bloody-conflict>Peruvian 
police attacked indigenous protesters, the 
government has been actively persecuting 
indigenous leaders and trying to undermine their 
organizations. Now it appears to be doing the same to their allies.

At the same time, the government continues on its 
course to open up as much of the Amazon as 
possible to oil and gas companies. In recent 
months, representatives from Perupetro, the state 
oil and gas agency, have been touring cities like 
London and Paris announcing a further 10.6 
million hectares of the Amazon are open for business this year.

AIDESEP have condemned Perupetro?s plans and said 
that indigenous people have not been consulted. 
Last month, in a move that provoked storms of 
criticism, president Alan Garcia 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/24/peru-president-blocks-conservation-law>blocked 
a law that would have recognized indigenous 
people's right to consultation about projects 
affecting their communities and land.

David Hill is a researcher with 
<http://www.survivalinternational.org/>Survival.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 12 15:40:34 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:40:34 -0700
Subject: [News] Lybian 'Hope' Ship On Its Way To Gaza
Message-ID: <mailman.155.1278963637.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



'Hope' Ship On Its Way To Gaza

author

  Monday July 12, 2010 01:50
author
 by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC & Agencies
http://www.imemc.org/article/59109

Palestinian independent Legislator, Jamal el-Khodary, head of the 
Popular Committee Against the Siege, and Arab member of Knesset, Dr. 
Ahmad Tibi, stated that the Hope solidarity ship sent by Libya 
continued its path to Gaza after arriving at Crete island.

The two legislators said that, so far, no delays were reported and 
that everything is going according to the original plan.

The ship was sent by Kaddafi Charitable Society, and is supported by 
Saif al-Islam, the son of Libyan leader Mommar Kaddafi.

Tibi and el-Khodary thanked Saif al-Islam for sending the ship that 
carries political and humanitarian messages.

El-Khodary stated that the ship carries medicine and humanitarian 
supplies, and that its organizers insist to reach Gaza to deliver 
them. They have detailed lists of everything and everybody aboard the ship.

The Palestinian Legislator thanked the Libyan President, different 
organizations that supported the ship and the Libyan people for 
standing against the illegal Israeli siege on Gaza.

He added that any Israeli attack against the ship is another act of 
piracy punishable by international law, and called on the 
international community to protect all solidarity ships.

Meanwhile, Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said that 
Israel will not allow the ship to reach Gaza.

Speaking to the Israeli Radio, Lieberman said that "no ship will 
reach Gaza", and considered solidarity ships as "acts that harm 
Israel's sovereignty".

He added that the ship must go to al-Arish Egyptian Port, or follow 
the orders of the Israeli army and dock in Ashdod Port.

The ship carries 2000 tons of foodstuffs, medicine, and other 
humanitarian supplies, while its organizers said that it does not 
violate international laws and regulations.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 12 16:09:20 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:09:20 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Ecuador=92s_Economy_Under_Rafael_Correa=3A_?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?_Twenty-First_Century_Socialism_or_the_New-Extractivism=3F?=
Message-ID: <mailman.158.1278965382.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Ecuador?s Economy Under Rafael Correa: 
Twenty-First Century Socialism or the 
New-Extractivism? ? An Inteview with Alberto Acosta

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2586-ecuadors-economy-under-rafael-correa-twenty-first-century-socialism-or-the-new-extractivism--an-inteview-with-alberto-acosta
Written by Jeffery R. Webber
Monday, 12 July 2010 09:54


I spoke with Alberto Acosta, ex-Minister of 
Energy and Mines, and ex-President of the 
Constituent Assembly, in his Quito office on July 8, 2010.

Jeffery R. Webber: In a few words, can you 
describe your political formation and political trajectory?

Alberto Acosta: I?m an economist. I?ve worked as 
an international consultant and as a university 
professor. I?ve been an advisor to social 
movements, to the indigenous movement. I?ve been 
involved in various struggles in the last few 
years which are trying to build a country based 
in equality, liberty, and justice. In the early 
part of the Rafael Correa government, I was the 
Minister of Energy and Mines and the President of the Constituent Assembly.

JW: As a former Minister of Energy and Mines, can 
you talk about the strengths and weaknesses of 
the economic model being advanced by the Correa 
government in the current conjuncture?

AA: We can?t talk about the economic development 
model of only this government. Stretching way 
back, Ecuador has had a model of accumulation 
based on the extraction of natural resources. 
Ecuador has been a country based in the 
production of bananas, flowers, shrimp, and oil, 
and there are people who now believe that it can 
be a country based in mining production.

In reality, we?ve been living off the rent of 
nature. In the last few decades, since the 1970s, 
Ecuador has had as its principal source of 
revenue the exploitation of oil ? the extraction 
of crude oil and the export of oil into the 
international market. This is a fundamental 
characteristic of the Ecuadorean economy. And 
this has not changed substantively under the government of Correa.

It?s true that he?s sought greater participation 
of the state in generating the oil rent. There?s 
been a certain increase of state control over oil 
activities. There?s been an attempt to increase 
the efficiency and to strengthen the state oil 
company. And the state?s greater take of the oil 
rent has allowed for improvements in education, health, and social welfare.

But at the root of things, the fact that Ecuador 
has an economy dependent on natural resources has 
not been altered, and we remain highly dependent 
on our insertion into the world market.

JW: You were also President of the Constituent 
Assembly. Can you talk about this process, and 
the advances and setbacks related to the new Constitution.

AA: The new constitution opened the door for a 
series of profound changes. Its statutes 
guarantee the construction of a plurinational 
state. This means the incorporation for the first 
time of marginalized groups, like indigenous 
peoples and nationalities, and Afro-Ecuadoreans. 
The constitution mandates respect for their 
unique ways of life and community organizing, and 
a new way of structuring the state in general.

The Constitution also commits the country to 
?living well,? or sumak kawsay, in Quichua, which 
is an entirely distinct way of understanding 
development. It?s another form of development. 
It?s an alternative to development, an 
alternative not within development, but an 
entirely different concept to development. Along 
these lines, the Constitution guarantees the 
rights of nature. Nature is a subject with rights 
in the Constitution. Ecuador?s Constitution is 
the only one in the world with this characteristic.

The Constitution also notes that water is a 
fundamental human right, not just access to 
water, but water itself. Water is a strategic 
patrimony. Water is part of biodiversity. It is central to nature.

JW: How do you explain the contrast between, on 
the one hand, the rhetoric of the Correa 
government ? ?citizens? revolution,? 
?twenty-first century socialism? ? and, on the 
other, the tense relations, often open clashes, 
between this government and prominent social movements?

AA: These phrases, citizens? revolution and 
twenty-first century socialism, have to be 
understood in their full context. Socialism of 
the twenty-first century has absolutely no 
meaning. It has no meaning. We need to rescue 
socialism from the errors of the last century, 
but we can?t do this by promoting some kind of 
?new age? socialism. For me, twenty-first century 
socialism has no meaning, it is pure rhetoric.

The phrase citizens? revolution is what popular 
struggles in Ecuador proposed and struggled for 
beginning in 2006 and 2007. Lamentably, it would 
appear that the Correa government has its doubts 
about making a revolution in reality. The very 
things this government proposed initially it is 
failing to make a reality; it is failing to 
respect the integral components of the new 
Constitution. This is the crucial thing to take note of.

At the moment, the ?citizens? revolution? suffers 
from a major deficit of citizens? involvement.

JW: And the contradictions with the social 
movements, the indigenous movements, government 
accusations of ?terrorism and sabotage??

AA: I believe that these types of accusations are 
tremendously shameful for the country. They have 
no basis in justice or a democratic judicial 
system. Even during the period of the neoliberal 
governments, when social movements and the 
indigenous movement were massively involved in 
protests ? there were never accusations of 
terrorism. This is a question that is putting the 
citizens? revolution itself at risk. It would 
appear that there are forces that are configuring 
themselves in a type of counter-revolution, without citizenship.

JW: For Canadian readers, can you describe some 
of the conflicts in the mining sector, and the 
role of Canadian companies, because they have a 
massive presence in this country.

AA: Without a doubt. Look, Canadian companies 
have been very active in this country for some 
years. One could say that Canadian companies were 
the primary beneficiaries of the new disposition 
of the mining laws throughout the early 2000s. 
These laws were meant to strengthen the presence 
of mining companies in Ecuador. This was a 
project pushed forward by the World Bank, and 
which received support from the governments of 
that epoch. We?re talking about the neoliberal epoch.

Canadian companies were the ones who took 
advantage of the new laws with the greatest 
enthusiasm, to invest in Ecuador. Canadian 
companies have expanded their presence in various 
regions of the country. In the Cordillera de 
Condor, in the Intag Valley, and elsewhere. 
They?ve managed to win a huge number of mining 
concessions. Ecuador gave out over 5,000 
concessions in an irresponsible manner, without 
any controls or criteria. The great majority of 
these concessions were concentrated in the hands 
of just a few companies, Canadian companies.

We can also see how some Canadian companies, such 
as Ascendant Copper, have tried to impose their 
objectives in an authoritarian manner in the 
country. They have established schemes of 
paramilitarism, in order to divide the 
communities of Intag, to intimidate these 
communities, and to impose mining activities.

I was personally a witness to how this company 
mobilized people to protest against my presence 
as Minister of Energy and Mines at the time 
because my politics ran against this type of 
corruption. I remember receiving threats and 
having rocks thrown at me during a meeting in the 
city of Ibarra, in the province of Imbabura. We 
saw how they acted, and how they threatened the 
communities. Thanks to the struggles of these 
very communities, and the actions of the Ministry 
of Energy and Mines at the time, we managed to 
disarm these paramilitaries, and achieved some 
justice. But there are still many problems in the 
region. I believe it?s important to highlight 
these events and what they signify.

JW: Shifting themes, we?ve seen a shift to the 
left in Latin America ? full of contradictions, 
but nonetheless a shift ? over the last decade. 
What has Ecuador?s role been inside this regional turn to the Left?

AA: There has been a series of very interesting 
processes in Latin America ? in Venezuela, 
Bolivia, and Ecuador. However, none of these new 
processes have managed to overcome the economic 
structures of extractivism. Bolivia continues to 
be dependent, even more dependent than before, on 
natural gas. Bolivia is making concerted efforts 
to extend oil, gas, and mineral extraction. In 
Ecuador the orientation is toward ongoing 
exploitation of oil. Although, one has to 
highlight the proposals of Ecuador to leave the 
oil under the ground in the National Park of 
Yasuni, which is positive. But, in general, it?s 
clear that there is no coherent position against 
the extractive model. There is a lot of talk of 
transformation and revolution, but it continues to be more of the same.

As I suggested, I don?t think there?s anything to 
what they?re calling socialism of the 
twenty-first century. What we?re witnessing 
instead is a neo-extractivism of the twenty-first century.

JW: In the long term, what does Ecuador need to 
change in its development model?

AA: What we need to do in the medium- to 
long-term is overcome this model of accumulation. 
We need another way to organize the economy, 
which is not so dependent on the exploitation of 
natural resources. We need to move from an 
extractive economic model, to one based in the 
knowledge, and forces, and needs of human beings, 
individual and collective. We also need another 
way of inserting ourselves into the world market 
that is more intelligent than simply providing 
raw materials. We need to start producing other 
kinds of products for the international market. 
But more than anything, fundamentally, we need to 
strengthen the internal market and to strengthen 
regional integration in Latin America. Ecuador 
needs to break with the extreme concentration of 
assets and income, and change the pattern. We 
need to achieve equality if there is to be 
justice and freedom. This is what we need. And 
this requires a lot of democracy. Always more democracy, and never less.

Jeffery R. Webber teaches politics at the 
University of Regina. He is the author of Red 
October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern 
Bolivia (Brill, 2010), and Rebellion to Reform in 
Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation 
and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket, 2011).




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 13 11:23:58 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:23:58 -0700
Subject: [News] Israel's 'street apartheid'
Message-ID: <mailman.4.1279034707.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Israel's 'street apartheid'
  By Mya Guarnieri

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/07/20107101335494763.html
Saturday, July 10, 2010

Mahmoud Alami, a Jerusalem taxi driver, knows the city like the back 
of his hand. He knows the neighbourhoods, the streets. And he knows 
the stop lights.

There is one in particular that troubles him not professionally but 
personally. It stands between Beit Hanina, a Palestinian 
neighbourhood, and Pisgaat Zeev, a Jewish settlement.

"It stays green for [settlers] for five minutes. But to go in and out 
of Beit Hanina? Only two or three cars can pass," Alami says. "It's 
too short. It causes a lot of traffic jams."

Al Jazeera found that stoplights that lead to Jewish settlements and 
neighbourhoods stay green for an average of a minute and a half. In 
Palestinian areas, it's 20 seconds. One light in predominantly Arab 
East Jerusalem is green for less than 10 seconds.

"[Palestinians] are stuck," says Amir Daud, another taxi driver. "It 
reflects a very bad situation for the people."

Budgetary discrimination
[]

Roads are poorly maintained in many Palestinian areas [GETTY]

Traffic jams are just one of the many problems that plague 
infrastructure and services in Palestinian areas of Jerusalem. Roads 
are poorly maintained. They are narrow and bumpy, riddled with cracks 
and potholes. Street signs and sidewalks are almost non-existent.

Trash containers are usually communal and there are often too few to 
meet the needs of the neighbourhood. Pedestrians, forced to walk on 
the shoulder of the road, wade through garbage.

Jewish neighbourhoods and settlements, on the other hand, are neat 
and orderly. Sidewalks and traffic circles keep pedestrians safe; 
roads are well-marked, some with lit signs. Most buildings have a 
garbage bin and the streets are free of litter.

In one Jewish area, a grassy median is adorned with a rainbow 
assortment of decorative sculptures - metal children playing, kicking 
footballs, and riding bikes.

When Al Jazeera presented a list detailing the differences between 
Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods to the Jerusalem municipality, the 
spokesperson denied the findings.

But, speaking on the condition of anonymity, a former employee of the 
Jerusalem municipality confirmed that there is discrimination on a 
budgetary level. The sports department offers the most dramatic 
example - only 0.5 per cent of funds are allocated to Palestinian 
neighbourhoods. The other 99.5 per cent goes to Jewish areas.

Quality of life

Nisreen Alyan, an attorney at the Association for Civil Rights in 
Israel (ACRI), has recently filed a petition protesting against the 
lack of garbage collection in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Tsur 
Baher, located in East Jerusalem. Despite a population of 20,000, 
only 12 streets receive the service.

This impacts both health and the quality of life, Alyan explains. 
Stray dogs, some carrying rabies, are attracted to the piles of 
trash. Residents have been attacked by the animals. And now children 
are afraid to go outside.

"There are no public gardens for them, they don't have anything," 
Alyan says. "So these streets are the only place for the cars, for 
the children, for the garbage, for the dogs, for everything."

The petition ACRI has filed asks the municipality to meet its legal 
responsibility, "nothing less, nothing more," Alyan says. "[This] 
means that they have to give [the residents] the right of sanitation."

Alyan has informed the city of Tsur Baher's troubles in the past. But 
the city claims it cannot serve the whole neighbourhood because 
garbage trucks cannot maneuver the small streets. Alyan points out 
that this should not be an obstacle. The municipality has found 
creative solutions in other parts of Jerusalem.

The streets in Tsur Baher are problematic, one resident explains. 
There are not enough of them.

While most Palestinian neighbourhoods are subject to building 
restrictions, Tsur Baher is one of the few that is free to build. 
Much of their land has been appropriated by a neighbouring 
settlement, Har Homa; some is on the other side of the Israeli-built 
separation barrier; and there is no infrastructure to reach what is left.

The lack of roads also means that emergency services cannot access 
all parts of the neighbourhood. Children have died in house fires. 
And because of a police order that prohibits ambulances from entering 
Palestinian neighbourhoods without a police escort residents have 
died waiting for medical care.

"The problem is that the policemen don't come in time," a resident 
says. "The ambulance is stopped waiting at the top of the 
neighbourhood for half an hour .... People have died in this situation."

"[ACRI is] writing another petition about it now," Alyan adds.

Paying taxes
[]

Lack of infrastructure leaves Palestinians feeling disconnected [EPA]

Asked about traffic lights in Tsur Baher, Alyan answers that there are none.

Out of concern for the children's safety, the residents scraped 
together the money to add speed bumps to the roads.

In other neighbourhoods, Palestinians have pooled funds to pay for 
garbage collection and street sweeping.

This is after they have paid taxes.

Because over 90 per cent of Israel's Palestinians live in towns 
separate from the Jewish population, many Israeli Jews excuse away 
the differences between Arab and Jewish areas with a "poor 
municipality" argument.

They are poor, their towns are poor. Arabs do not pay a lot of taxes, 
or enough taxes, or any taxes at all, Israeli Jews say, so their 
villages cannot afford the same services they enjoy.

But that reasoning falls apart in Jerusalem, a city striped with 
Palestinian and Jewish areas. And with Nof Tzion (Zion View), a 
Jewish settlement found smack in the centre of Jabel Mukhaber, a 
Palestinian neighbourhood, the differences are glaringly obvious.

"For years, [Jabel Mukhaber] didn't have a main street," Alyan says. 
"Just after they built Nof Tzion, [the municipality] built a very 
fine street with pavement and lights." But the road stops dead after 
Nof Tzion. It gets bumpy, dropping off into gravel, then dirt, for 
the Palestinians.

The "poor municipality" argument does not hold weight in Jerusalem 
for another reason. To the city's Palestinians, who have only 
residency and no citizenship, paying taxes is tremendously important.

"If you won't pay your taxes, you won't have proof that east 
Jerusalem is the centre of your life and if you can't prove that, you 
will lose your residency," Alyan explains. This means that one 
becomes stateless, a refugee.

"Before [Palestinian residents of Jerusalem] find money to feed their 
children, they pay their taxes," Alyan says.

Tsur Baher, along with neighbouring Umm Tuba, pays approximately $7mn 
in taxes annually to a municipality they do not get to vote for. East 
Jerusalem residents tell Alyan that they just want the government to 
invest what they have paid back into the neighbourhoods.

'Psychological warfare'

Yousef Jabareen, the director of Dirasat, the Arab Centre for Law and 
Policy, explains that public services are also funded on the national 
level. This is another point of inequality.

Jabareen points to the "National Priority" programme that gave 
economic incentives to government-selected areas. When the programme 
was introduced in 1998, 500 Jewish towns received national priority 
status. While Palestinians make up nearly 20 per cent of Israel's 
population, and half of the nation's poor, only four Arab villages 
were selected.

"That was a classic example of how the allocation of government 
resources is discriminatory," Jabareen says, adding that grave 
inequalities can be found in the state-funded educational system as well.

Everything - from the poor conditions of the infrastructure to the 
lack of public services - adds up to leave Palestinians feeling 
rejected and disconnected, Jabareen says.

"It's a feeling of frustration and of not belonging .... That the 
government and state is excluding you and you are not counted as an equal."

Do the disparities in Jerusalem's neighbourhoods and the differences 
in funding throughout the nation amount to apartheid?

"In some areas you could identify some characteristics of apartheid 
that should raise a lot of concern about the future," Jabareen comments.

A young Israeli Jew, fresh from army service, simply remarks, "It's a 
kind of psychological warfare. The idea is to get [Palestinians] to leave."




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 13 11:13:35 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:13:35 -0700
Subject: [News] Israel's video game killing technology
Message-ID: <mailman.7.1279034712.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Israel's video game killing technology

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 13 July 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11390.shtml


It is called Spot and Shoot. Operators sit in front of a TV monitor 
from which they can control the action with a PlayStation-style joystick.

The aim: to kill terrorists.

Played by: young women serving in the Israeli army.

Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look 
like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people -- 
Palestinians in Gaza -- who can be killed with the press of a button 
on the joystick.

The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are 
responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns 
mounted on watch-towers every few hundred meters along an electronic 
fence that surrounds Gaza.

The system is one of the latest "remote killing" devices developed by 
Israel's Rafael armaments company, the former weapons research 
division of the Israeli army and now a separate governmental firm.

According to Giora Katz, Rafael's vice-president, remote-controlled 
military hardware such as Spot and Shoot is the face of the future. 
He expects that within a decade at least a third of the machines used 
by the Israeli army to control land, air and sea will be unmanned.

The demand for such devices, the Israeli army admits, has been partly 
fueled by a combination of declining recruitment levels and a 
population less ready to risk death in combat.

Oren Berebbi, head of its technology branch, recently told an 
American newspaper: "We're trying to get to unmanned vehicles 
everywhere on the battlefield ... We can do more and more missions 
without putting a soldier at risk."

Rapid progress with the technology has raised alarm at the United 
Nations. Philip Alston, its special rapporteur on extrajudicial 
executions, warned last month of the danger that a "PlayStation 
mentality to killing" could quickly emerge.

According to analysts, however, Israel is unlikely to turn its back 
on hardware that it has been at the forefront of developing -- using 
the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and especially Gaza, as testing 
laboratories.

Remotely controlled weapons systems are in high demand from 
repressive regimes and the burgeoning homeland security industries 
around the globe.

"These systems are still in the early stages of development but there 
is a large and growing market for them," said Shlomo Brom, a retired 
general and defense analyst at the Institute of National Security 
Studies at Tel Aviv University.

The Spot and Shoot system -- officially known as Sentry Tech -- has 
mostly attracted attention in Israel because it is operated by 19- 
and 20-year-old female soldiers, making it the Israeli army's only 
weapons system operated exclusively by women.

Female soldiers are preferred to operate remote killing devices 
because of a shortage of male recruits to Israel's combat units. 
Young women can carry out missions without breaking the social taboo 
of risking their lives, said Brom.

The women are supposed to identify anyone suspicious approaching the 
fence around Gaza and, if authorized by an officer, execute them 
using their joysticks.

The Israeli army, which plans to introduce the technology along 
Israel's other confrontation lines, refuses to say how many 
Palestinians have been killed by the remotely controlled machine-guns 
in Gaza. According to the Israeli media, however, it is believed to 
be several dozen.

The system was phased-in two years ago for surveillance, but 
operators were only able to open fire with it more recently. The army 
admitted using Sentry Tech in December to kill at least two 
Palestinians several hundred meters inside the fence.

The Haaretz newspaper, which was given rare access to a Sentry Tech 
control room, quoted one soldier, Bar Keren, 20, saying: "It's very 
alluring to be the one to do this. But not everyone wants this job. 
It's no simple matter to take up a joystick like that of a Sony 
PlayStation and kill, but ultimately it's for defense."

Audio sensors on the towers mean that the women hear the shot as it 
kills the target. No woman, Haaretz reported, had failed the task of 
shooting what the army calls an "incriminated" Palestinian.

The Israeli military, which enforces a so-called "buffer zone" -- an 
unmarked no-man's land -- inside the fence that reaches as deep as 
300 metres into the tiny enclave, has been widely criticized for 
opening fire on civilians entering the closed zone.

In separate incidents in April, a 21-year-old Palestinian 
demonstrator was shot dead and a Maltese solidarity activist wounded 
when they took part in protests to plant a Palestinian flag in the 
buffer zone. The Maltese woman, Bianca Zammit, was videoing as she was hit.

It is unclear whether Spot and Shoot has been used against such demonstrations.

The Israeli army claims Sentry Tech is "revolutionary." And that will 
make its marketing potential all the greater as other armies seek out 
innovations in "remote killing" technology.

Rafael is reported to be developing a version of Sentry Tech that 
will fire long-range guided missiles.

Another piece of hardware recently developed for the Israeli army is 
the Guardium, an armored robot-car that can patrol territory at up to 
80km per hour, navigate through cities, launch "ambushes" and shoot 
at targets. It now patrols the Israeli borders with Gaza and Lebanon.

Its Israeli developers, G-Nius, have called it the world's first 
"robot soldier". It looks like a first-generation version of the 
imaginary "robot-armour" worn by soldiers in the popular recent 
sci-fi movie Avatar.

Rafael has produced the first unmanned naval patrol boat, the 
"Protector", which has been sold to Singapore's navy and is being 
heavily marketing in the US. A Rafael official, Patrick Bar-Avi, told 
the Israeli business daily Globes: "Navies worldwide are only now 
beginning to examine the possible uses of such vehicles, and the 
possibilities are endless."

But Israel is most known for its role in developing "unmanned aerial 
vehicles" -- or drones, as they have come to be known. Originally 
intended for spying, and first used by Israel over south Lebanon in 
the early 1980s, today they are increasingly being used for 
extrajudicial executions from thousands of feet in the sky.

In February Israel officially unveiled the 14 meter-long Heron TP 
drone, the largest ever. Capable of flying from Israel to Iran and 
carrying more than a ton of weapons, the Heron was tested by Israel 
in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in winter 2008-09, when some 1,400 
Palestinians were killed.

More than 40 countries now operate drones, many of them made in 
Israel, although so far only the Israeli and US armies have deployed 
them as remote-controlled killing machines. Israeli drones are being 
widely used in Afghanistan.

Smaller drones have been sold to the German, Australian, Spanish, 
French, Russian, Indian and Canadian armies. Brazil is expected to 
use the drone to provide security for the 2014 World Cup 
championship, and the Panamanian and Salvadoran governments want them 
too, ostensibly to run counter-drug operations.

Despite its diplomatic crisis with Ankara, Israel was reported last 
month to have completed a deal selling a fleet of 10 Herons to the 
Turkish army for $185 million.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. 
His latest books are 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/theelectronic-20>Israel 
and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the 
Middle East (Pluto Press) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/theelectronic-20>Disappearing 
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His 
website is <http://www.jkcook.net/>www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in 
<http://www.thenational.ae/>The National, published in Abu Dhabi.



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 14 10:04:30 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:04:30 -0700
Subject: [News] Iroquois Lacrosse Team Trapped in U.S.?
Message-ID: <mailman.40.1279116338.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Iroquois Lacrosse Team Trapped in U.S.?



Native American Team Could Miss Championships in U.K. Over New Travel 
Documentation Rules

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/13/national/main6672695.shtml

(AP)  The teams participating in the World Lacrosse Championships in 
England represent 30 nations, from Argentina to Latvia to South Korea 
to Iroquois.

The Iroquois helped invent lacrosse and, in a rare example of 
international recognition of American Indian sovereignty, they 
participate at every tournament as a separate nation. But they might 
not be at this year's world championship tournament because of a 
dispute over the validity of their passports.

The 23 players have passports issued by the Iroquois Confederacy, a 
group of six Indian nations overseeing land that stretches from 
upstate New York into Ontario, Canada.

The U.S. government says it will only let players back into the 
country if they have U.S. passports, a team official said. The 
British government, meanwhile, won't give the players visas if they 
cannot guarantee they'll be allowed to go home, the official said.

Iroquois team members born within U.S. borders have been offered U.S. 
passports, but the players refuse to carry them, because they see the 
government-issued documents as an attack on their identity, said 
Tonya Gonnella Frichner, a member of the Onondaga Nation who works 
with the team.

"It's about sovereignty, citizenship and self-identification," said 
Frichner, who also is the North American Regional Representative to 
the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

The Iroquois have used their own passports in the past, but State 
Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the new dispute can be traced 
to the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which went into effect 
last year. The new rules require, among other things, that Americans 
carry passports or high-tech documents to cross the country's borders.

"Since they last traveled on their own passports, the requirements in 
terms of the kind of documents that are necessary to facilitate 
travel within and outside the hemisphere have changed," Crowley said. 
"We are trying to help them get the appropriate travel documents so 
they can travel to this tournament."

Tribes' efforts to meet the new security requirements have been 
ongoing. A group of American Indian leaders requested funding from 
the Department of Homeland Security in 2009 to develop cards that 
would comply with the new rules, according to an agency document. 
Idaho's Kootenai tribe and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agreed 
last year to develop the first enhanced tribal card acceptable under 
the new guidelines.

Asked whether the Iroquois passport could be acceptably modified to 
meet the stricter standards, Crowley referred questions to the 
Department of Homeland Security.

That agency declined to discuss the specifics of the case. Matt 
Chandler, a Homeland Security spokesman, said his agency was working 
with the Department of State and others to resolve the issue.

One Iroquois player, Brett Bucktooth, said he would rather miss the 
tournament than travel under a U.S. passport.

"That's the people we are, and that's our identity," he said.

Bucktooth, 27, also spoke of his deep cultural and personal 
connection with lacrosse - first played by Iroquois and Huron, 
perhaps as early as 1,000 years ago.

"My father put a wooden lacrosse stick into my crib when I was a 
baby, and now that I have a son, I put a lacrosse stick into his 
crib," he said. "In our culture, we all start playing lacrosse young."

Bucktooth and other Iroquois see lacrosse as a gift to the tribes 
from their creator. Lacrosse was played by American Indians as a 
preparation for war and "to resolve conflicts, heal the sick, and 
develop strong, virile men," according to US Lacrosse, the American 
governing body of the sport.

Today, the Iroquois team is ranked No. 4 by the Federation of 
International Lacrosse and represents the Haudenosaunee - an Iroquois 
Confederacy of the Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Tuscarora, Cayuga and 
Onondaga nations. About 90,000 Haudenosaunee, or "the people of the 
longhouse," live today in New York, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and the 
Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, said Onondaga chief Oren Lyons.

The Iroquois team was scheduled to play at the 2010 World Lacrosse 
Championship that starts Thursday in Manchester, England.

The Iroquois team and its entourage of 25 - coaches, staff and family 
members - would have to leave New York by Tuesday evening at the 
latest to participate in the tournament, which is staged every four years.

The team has been traveling on Iroquois passports for the past 20 
years, and Iroquois passport-holders have been using them to go 
abroad since 1977, said Denise Waterman, a member of the team's board 
of directors. Within the last year, colleagues used their Iroquois 
passports to travel to Japan and Sweden without any problems, she said.

In the past, U.S. immigration officials accepted the Iroquois 
passports when they obtained visas - including for trips to Britain 
in 1985 and 1994, and as recently as 2002 to Australia. The 2006 
tournament was held in Canada.

Members of the Western Shoshonee and Hopi nations also have traveled 
internationally using similar passports, some within the last few 
months, said Valerie Taliman, a publicist for the Iroquois team.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson wrote a letter to Secretary of State 
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Homeland Security Secretary Janet 
Napolitano on Tuesday, urging them to help the team reach its destination.

"As a governor of a state with a significant Native American 
population, I know many tribes and pueblos will watch carefully how 
these young competitors are treated by the administration," he wrote.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., reached out to White House officials 
on Monday on behalf of the team, Frichner said.

Last week, the Iroquois team learned from a State Department official 
that the U.S. government would not allow it to return on its 
Haudenosaunee-issued passports, according to Frichner. The British 
Consulate in New York said it could only issue visas after receiving 
"a written confirmation from the Department of Homeland Security that 
you can leave the country and come back," she said.

Team officials went to the British Consulate in New York on Monday to 
reapply for the visas and plead their case, but were turned away. 
Later in the day, the English Lacrosse Association said in a 
statement it expected "the Iroquois will arrive on time for the 
opening ceremony and games."

After fighting off attempts at assimilation for more than a century, 
issues of sovereignty strike a deep chord for many Native Americans, 
said Dean Kotlowski, a history professor at Salisbury University in 
Maryland who specializes in American Indian policy.

"What's at stake is their culture, their identity, their tribes, 
their reservations," he said. "They've seen diminishment ... of their 
population, threats to their way of life."

The Iroquois team was in Manhattan on Monday as it awaited news of 
its status. It has been training on Staten Island in New York City, 
using the football field at Wagner College.

"We're anxious but optimistic," team manager Ansley Jemison said. "I 
don't think a lacrosse team full of world-class athletes poses much 
of a threat to homeland security."



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 14 10:54:47 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:54:47 -0700
Subject: [News] Handcuffing 6-Year-Olds in New Orleans
Message-ID: <mailman.45.1279119838.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


[]

Published on The Root (<http://www.theroot.com>http://www.theroot.com)

<http://www.theroot.com/>Home > Handcuffing 6-Year-Olds in New 
Orleans? Seriously?

----------


Handcuffing 6-Year-Olds in New Orleans? Seriously?

By: Brentin Mock
Posted: July 9, 2010 at 7:59 AM

School officials shackled Ja'Briel Weston to a chair for being 
disobedient. Two days later, they did it again. Now his father is 
suing. Why we should all be concerned.

Six-year-old Ja'Briel Weston was shackled by his ankle to a chair for 
disobeying his first-grade teacher. Two days later, he was 
apprehended by an armed security guard, dragged down a hallway and 
handcuffed to a chair for getting into a shoving match with another 
student. This didn't happen at some medieval-age boarding school. It 
happened this year, this May, in New Orleans, at Sarah T. Reed 
Elementary School.

When Ja'Briel's parents found out about this, his father, Sebastian 
Weston, met with the school's principal, Daphyne Burnett, who not 
only confessed to the child cuffing but also said that she'd have it 
done again if the child got out of line. According to a legal 
complaint filed by the 
<http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-sues-new-orleans-school-after-student-handcuffed>Southern 
Poverty Law Center and the <http://jjpl.org/new/>Juvenile Justice 
Project of Louisiana, "When [Ja'Briel's] father implored the school 
principal to stop these unconstitutional practices, she insisted that 
school policy required the arrests and seizures at the school."

The juvenile-justice advocacy organizations are helping the father 
sue not only the school and its security officers but also the 
Recovery School District, the city's public school system, for 
allowing the "required" policy to take shape. Since the incident, 
young Ja'Briel has suffered pain in his wrists and ankles, as well as 
longer-lasting harm to his emotional and psychological well-being. 
This is increasingly cruel, but unfortunately not unusual punishment, 
since New Orleans isn't the only city to 
<http://www.stateline.org/live/printable/story?contentId=18518>cuff a 
6-year-old. But if there is a city that could do with less emotional 
pain, it is New Orleans, whose children in the thousands, displaced 
as a result of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, have bounced city to 
city, school to school, ever since.

It is also a city where one of the largest education-reform 
experiments anywhere is being implemented. But the officials at Sarah 
T. Reed will have to remind the nation why introducing children to 
Officer Friendly by way of cold, metal wrist restraints is a best 
practice for optimum learning environments. Data supporting such a 
claim do not exist. When young black boys like Ja'Briel aren't being 
chained like criminals for petty behavior, they are being suspended 
and expelled from school at rates two to three times those of their 
white peers -- often 
<http://www.learnersedgeinc.com/file/737-6.pdf>because of their race 
(pdf). Excessive punishment is being meted out more often to kids to 
whom breakfast is not given and for whom lunch is free because of 
their families' poverty.

School administrators believe that they need to get tough on bad 
behavior, but there is little evidence that this is a deterrent. In 
New Orleans, schools struggle with a lack of resources to deal 
adequately with student populations that fluctuate with volatility, 
and include children with a range of stress disorders due to 
disasters. Just two years ago, Reed principal Burnett was featured in 
a 
<http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june08/nolareads_06-17.html>PBS 
special in which she complained of overcrowding in her school.

"When you look at younger kids, out of anything they could have lost, 
it was the opportunity to have a stable learning environment," said 
Burnett in the program. "You know, some of them, this is their first 
time going to school because Katrina hit."

But instead of stable learning environments being created, it's 
pipelines that are being created -- pipelines to the penal 
institution. It begins with kids being handcuffed and suspended at 
early ages, and continues with them being locked up later in life. 
Students who are suspended early on (Ja'Briel was suspended shortly 
after the handcuff incident) are 
<http://www.nyclu.org/content/impact-of-school-suspensions-and-demand-passage-of-student-safety-act>three 
times more likely to drop out before 10th grade, and drop-out status 
triples a child's chances of ending up in jail later.

In the report 
"<http://www.nesri.org/fact_sheets_pubs/Pushed_Out_Report.pdf>Pushed 
Out, Harsh Discipline in Louisiana Schools Denies the Right to 
Education" (pdf), published by Families and Friends of Louisiana's 
Incarcerated Children, a disturbing picture is painted of disparate 
discipline practices in New Orleans schools: Suspensions in the 
Recovery School District are among the highest in the state, with 
some 186 out-of-school suspensions from just 33 schools handed out 
each week. The district's suspension rate, 28.8 percent, is four 
times the national rate. Of the students the organization surveyed, 
37 percent said that they fell behind in school after suspension, and 
25 percent said that they felt less motivated to learn.

Meanwhile, the report shows how out-of-school suspension and 
expulsion rates increased after Katrina, as did budgets for security 
officers -- $20 million in 2006-2007, as opposed to $3 million for 
2004-2005 -- despite significantly fewer students.

If there are any doubts about whether prison bars are in the forecast 
for some of these students, consider that just last week, the city 
council 
<http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/07/new_prison_complex_plan_approv.html>approved 
a sheriff's plan to expand a major prison complex in the city. The 
juvenile courts are also in question, after one of the system's 
judges 
<http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/07/report_says_former_juvenile_co.html>resigned 
this week after multiple female employees within his courthouse 
accused him of sexual harassment. Some of the city's leaders are even 
confused 
<http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/11/mayoral_campaign_will_be_educa.html>about 
what the Youth Study Center is -- a detention center where youth 
offenders are currently baking because of malfunctioning air conditioners.

Other cities are dealing with poor disciplinary practices, as 
reported in 
<http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2007/10/the-discipline.html>Florida, 
<http://journalismfor.us/JJIE/2010/07/school-discipline/>Georgia and 
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/eedition/chi-070924discipline,0,7975055.story>Illinois. 
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that a middle school that 
<http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-479.ZS.html>searched a 
13-year-old girl's backpack, bra and panties for alleged 
prescription-pill peddling (never found) violated her Fourth 
Amendment rights. What this all adds up to are zero-tolerance 
policies that have already slid too far down the slope of acceptable 
disciplinary practice.

One plausible reason that schools have been able to get away with so 
much is that students themselves are rarely included at the table 
when disciplinary sentencing rules are established. In New Orleans, a 
group called <http://www.therethinkers.com/what-weve-done/>Kids 
Rethink New Orleans Schools has set out to change that. In this 
group, children from the Recovery School District brainstorm conflict 
resolutions and make recommendations on how schools can preserve 
dignity for students even when delivering punishment. Among 
<http://www.therethinkers.com/wp-content/Recommendations-09.pdf>recommendations 
they made last year (pdf) are deterring mandatory use of metal 
detectors in elementary schools, and increasing social worker and 
counseling staffs in schools.

If Ja'Briel Weston's father, and the juvenile-justice advocates 
supporting him, win their case, schools will hopefully get an 
opportunity to produce alternatives to their current methods of 
dealing with problem children. And perhaps a win will compel the 
school district and state government to supply more resources so that 
schools can implement those alternatives. If they lose, this would 
send a bad signal to other schools throughout New Orleans and beyond, 
that shackling 6-year-olds is acceptable. Just as common sense tells 
us that waterboarding is torture, we should be able to discern that 
handcuffing is cruel and unusual for children in their earliest ages 
of development.

Brentin Mock, a regular contributor to The Root, is based in New Orleans.

----------
Source URL: 
<http://www.theroot.com/views/nola-child-handcuffs>http://www.theroot.com/views/nola-child-handcuffs

Links:
[1] http://www.theroot.com/users/brentinmock
[2] 
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-sues-new-orleans-school-after-student-handcuffed
[3] http://jjpl.org/new/
[4] http://www.stateline.org/live/printable/story?contentId=18518
[5] http://www.learnersedgeinc.com/file/737-6.pdf
[6] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june08/nolareads_06-17.html
[7] 
http://www.nyclu.org/content/impact-of-school-suspensions-and-demand-passage-of-student-safety-act
[8] http://www.nesri.org/fact_sheets_pubs/Pushed_Out_Report.pdf
[9] 
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/07/new_prison_complex_plan_approv.html
[10] 
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/07/report_says_former_juvenile_co.html
[11] 
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/11/mayoral_campaign_will_be_educa.html
[12] 
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2007/10/the-discipline.html
[13] http://journalismfor.us/JJIE/2010/07/school-discipline/
[14] 
http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/eedition/chi-070924discipline,0,7975055.story
[15] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-479.ZS.html
[16] http://www.therethinkers.com/what-weve-done/
[17] http://www.therethinkers.com/wp-content/Recommendations-09.pdf
[18] http://www.facebook.com/theroot
[19] http://www.twitter.com/theroot247
[20] http://www.theroot.com/sites/default/files/jabriel1.JPG




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 14 11:34:02 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:34:02 -0700
Subject: [News] Fadlallah and the Western media's dangerous complicity
Message-ID: <mailman.53.1279121664.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Fadlallah and the Western media's dangerous complicity

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11391.shtml
Matthew Cassel, The Electronic Intifada, 14 July 2010



There is a lot to say about Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein 
Fadlallah, the Lebanese Shia Muslim cleric who passed away on 4 July 
2010 at the age of 75. Unfortunately, much of what there is to say is 
being left unsaid for more of the same sensationalist reporting on 
this region and its people.

Fadlallah was a progressive Shia cleric, known for his defense of 
armed resistance and women's rights. He was outspoken against 
Israel's 22 year occupation of south Lebanon and cheered attacks 
against it. In 1985 the CIA is thought to have been behind a massive 
car bomb that attempted to take his life -- it missed the Ayatollah 
killing 80 other Lebanese civilians and injured hundreds more. 
However, his support for resistance didn't end with the Israeli 
invaders; Ayatollah Fadlallah also said that women have the right to 
use violence to resist domestic abuse.

The day after his death, Nasawiya, a feminist collective in Lebanon, 
wrote a post on Facebook telling Fadlallah: "Your feminist voice will 
be missed." The post linked to an obituary by journalist Zeinab Yaghi 
writing in Arabic for the Lebanese daily As-Safir where she wrote of 
Fadlallah: "Women used to see him as a father" and that he 
"encouraged women to work."

He was a leader for many Shia Muslims in Lebanon and elsewhere around 
the world. In Lebanon, a country divided along strict sectarian 
lines, he was a truly unique religious figure for the respect that he 
garnered from people of other faiths and the secular alike.

Most headlines in English-language media outlets have wrongly linked 
Fadlallah to Hizballah, the Shia Islamic resistance and political 
group in Lebanon. It is said that Fadlallah influenced some of 
Hizballah's founders along with numerous other young Shias in the 
years leading up to and during Hizballah's formation in the early 
1980s. But in Lebanon it is widely known that, despite their mutual 
respect for each other, Fadlallah and Hizballah did not work together 
and even disagreed on many issues. Some of these fundamental 
differences stem from Hizballah's close relationship with the Islamic 
Republic of Iran, whereas Fadlallah had long opposed the Ayatollah 
Khomeini-inspired clerical leadership of the country after its 1979 revolution.

This intentional mistake of linking Fadlallah to Hizballah should 
come as little surprise from a media that too often chooses 
sensationalism over accuracy when covering Lebanon and the region. As 
a journalist and photographer working in Lebanon, I know that 
European and US media are rarely interested in political or religious 
topics when the focus is not Hizballah. Ayatollah Fadlallah's 
importance had little to do with Hizballah, and that was clear on 6 
July 2010 when hundreds of thousands took to the streets to mourn his death.

Breaking from this sensationalist coverage was a blog post on the 
British government's website by Frances Guy, the British ambassador 
in Lebanon (whose positions 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11146.shtml>I've criticized 
in the past), which contained the following:

"The world needs more men like [Fadlallah] willing to reach out 
across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and 
daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace. "

It was a very kind tribute to a religious leader based on Guy's 
experience learning about Fadlallah and meeting him in Beirut. She 
even succeeded in not mentioning "Hizballah" once. I would happily 
link to the post had it not been removed "after mature consideration" 
by the UK Foreign Office who thought that Guy was being a bit too 
laudatory of a person who died under the "Hizballah leader" 
headlines. (Fortunately, what goes on the web stays on the web and 
you can find her post cached 
<http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TFmI-tgOGuoJ:blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/guy/entry/the_passing_of_decent_men+frances+guy+decent+men&hl=ar&gl=lb&strip=0>here.) 
Guy later wrote a new post expressing regret for ever writing the tribute:

"I have no truck with terrorism wherever it is committed in whoever's 
name. The British Government has been clear that it condemns 
terrorist activity carried out by Hizballah. I share that view."

Similar to Guy, Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor of Mideast affairs, 
also offered her admiration for Fadlallah after his death over the 
social networking site Twitter:

"Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. 
One of Hizballah's giants I respect a lot."

Nasr, a Lebanese-American journalist who has worked with CNN for 20 
years, later wrote an article regretting her tweet which was then 
removed; in her article she was sure to remind us which side she is 
on, using the words "terror" or terrorist" five times. I've followed 
her work with CNN and know that her reporting would hardly upset 
anyone in any recent US administration. Yet the one time she does, 
she loses her job as a result.

These blatant acts of censorship by western governments and media 
prove that showing an accurate or nuanced picture of the Middle East 
is not high on their agendas. After all, an accurate picture would 
show that western-waged and backed wars in this region are far from 
just, and therefore it's easy to understand how resistance to them is 
widely supported. Not only did Fadlallah support resistance, but he 
also challenged the stereotype many have in the west of Islam as a 
religion intolerant of women's rights.

Fadlallah was a leader that anyone even slightly familiar with this 
region could easily respect. The censored coverage of his passing in 
the west proves the complicity of our media with our government's 
deadly and oppressive policies in the Middle East.

Matthew Cassel is based in Beirut, Lebanon and is Assistant Editor of 
The Electronic Intifada. His website is 
<http://justimage.org>http://justimage.org.



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 14 18:07:29 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:07:29 -0700
Subject: [News] Haiti - Six Months After the Quake
Message-ID: <mailman.61.1279145272.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Haiti: Six Months after the Quake

by Johnny Van Hove / July 13th, 2010
<http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/07/haiti-six-months-after-the-quake-2/>DISSIDENT 
VOICE
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/07/haiti-six-months-after-the-quake-2/

Half a year following the earthquake, conditions 
in Haiti are worse than ever. Still, there is ?a 
lot to be hopeful for?, according to Robert Roth 
of the activist network Haiti Action Committee 
who recently visited the Caribbean island. An interview.

Johnny Van Hove: How are the living conditions in 
Haiti six months after the quake?

Robert Roth: During my visit a few weeks ago, I 
was struck by the absence of systematic aid for 
Haitians. The food distribution has been 
haphazard at best. Work is scarce and there are 
no massive efforts to prepare for the approaching 
hurricanes. Above all, shelter for the 1.5 
million Haitians living in the camps is hardly 
existent and highly insufficient for the rainy 
season. Haiti truly is experiencing a 
humanitarian disaster of the highest order.

JVH: In what kind of shape are the refugee camps?

RR: Most people are living under plastic, sheets, 
or tarps ? not tents. There is hardly any space 
between the shelters. Sanitation is mostly 
non-existent. If you take a look inside the 
plastic tarps, people are cramped next to each 
other in narrow spaces. Some sheets are all they 
possess and these get soaked as soon as the tarp 
is flooded by the frequent rains.?

JVH: Over-crowding, bad sanitation, the rainy 
season: how do these elements affect the health situation in the camps?

RR: We spoke with a number of Haitian doctors and 
medical workers who are running clinics at the 
Aristide Foundation. There is a real fear of 
epidemics. The day-to-day health issues are 
worrying too. Children are asthmatic because of 
the dust everywhere. Eye diseases, irritations, 
rashes, and constant headaches are major problems 
too. The same goes for dysentery, as there is 
very little potable water. The general health situation is horrific.

JVH: Considering these conditions, how are the 
Haitians you have talked to responding?

RR: We visited three camps and met with many 
grassroots activists on our trip. There is a high 
level of frustration with both the Haitian 
government and the international relief effort. 
Much has been promised, and hardly anything has been delivered.

In one camp, near the airport, residents had not 
seen any aid of any kind since late February. 
When we asked them about the Pr?val government, 
they said it was a ?zero? and did not represent 
them. When we asked about the UN, they said they 
just drive by with their guns out. They want 
food, work and shelter for their families ? and they have not gotten that.

Weekly demonstrations against the Pr?val 
government and the UN occupation have been 
growing. One week before I was there, 30,000 
people had demonstrated in Port-au-Prince, 
calling for Pr?val?s ouster, democratic and fair 
elections, the end of the UN occupation, and the 
return of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide 
to Haiti. It?s a charged political situation right now.

JVH: In our last interview, you mentioned the 
high degree of grassroots organizing in Haiti. 
Have you seen that happening in the camps too?

RR: Yes. This is one aspect of the situation in 
Haiti that goes unreported. In one refugee camp, 
Camp Mesiane, women organizers mobilized people 
to demonstrate in front of a Red Cross center, 
since they had received no aid. They then 
continued to meet with camp residents to deal 
with security, health needs and food. This is 
happening in many camps. It is Haitians helping 
Haitians, treating each other with dignity in the midst of crisis.

JVH: Are there Haitian organizations which are 
particularly stepping up in the camps?

RR: The Aristide Foundation has been providing 
medical services and relief from the days right 
after the quake. From February on, it ran mobile 
schools in five refugee camps, reaching over 
1,200 students. The Foundation created a weekly 
health clinic that serves 1,000 patients each 
week. It also has a mental health project in 
which Haitian health workers are going into the 
camps to reach out to people who have experienced 
the most severe psychological trauma. All of this 
work ? doing the maximum with the minimum amount 
of resources ? has had a deep impact.

JVH: Are the camps as unsafe as a number of media 
and relief organizations suggest?

RR: Of course there are major security issues 
when 1.5 million people are living in refugee 
camps, when the infrastructure is shattered, when 
communities have been uprooted, and when massive 
poverty and hunger is the norm. But Haiti is not 
a crime scene. The vast majority of people in Haiti are just trying to survive.

The issue of ?security? is highly politicized in 
Haiti. It has been used to justify attacks on 
popular organizations and communities, including 
violent assaults against community-based groups 
in Cite Soleil and other pro-Lavalas areas. When 
?insecurity? is projected as the main issue, 
rather than the undemocratic nature of the 
current government or the desperate situation 
faced by millions of people, that reflects a political agenda.

JVH: What about sexual violence, which is rampant 
in the camps according to various human rights organizations?

RR: The conditions in the camps heighten the 
dangers of sexual violence. It?s a real issue, 
one that community-based organizations ? 
particularly women?s groups ? are conscious of 
and working to address. At the same time, I 
believe that some human rights groups have presented this issue narrowly.

There is little discussion of the role of UN 
troops and the Haitian police force in regards to 
sexual violence. In 2007, 114 UN soldiers from 
Sri Lanka were sent home after widespread charges 
of rape and child abuse. Many people talked to us 
on this trip about how UN soldiers and Haitian 
police use access to food and aid in exchange for 
sex. This amounts to forced prostitution, 
completely linked to militarism and occupation. 
Why isn?t this being highlighted as well?

JVH: How did the Haitians you talked to evaluate the UN relief efforts so far?

RR: After distributing tarps and food in the 
first few weeks after the earthquake, the impact 
of the UN organizations is considered dismal 
since late February. The UN stopped its Emergency Food

Program in April, for instance, because it 
decided it was time to provide ?cash for work?. 
The main presence of the UN is not as relief 
workers; it?s as soldiers on patrol, pointing 
guns at people. They are considered a foreign 
occupying army. Many Haitians feel that the UN is 
targeting instead of helping them. In the absence 
of an effective relief effort, the UN presence is 
a daily reminder that Haiti is being run by foreign powers.

JVH: The Haitian political class handed over a 
great deal of its powers to the Haiti Recovery 
Commission, which has a mandate to coordinate 
distribution of all aid for at least 18 months. Who runs the commission?

RR: In the commission, big international players, 
such as the IMF, the World Bank, the U.S., Canada 
and France, are represented. It is chaired by 
Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Max 
Bellerive. Supposedly, President Pr?val has veto 
power over any decisions, but Clinton is clearly 
running it: Esquire Magazine has just called him ?the de facto CEO? of Haiti.

The Commission is in charge of doling out the 
$5.3 billion dollars which were pledged ? not 
given yet, pledged ? by UN members states and 
international institutions at the international 
donor conference in March. This kind of money 
will be used to reconfigure Haiti with a fairly 
classic model: low-wage factory work, a tourist 
industry, free trade zones with tax breaks for 
multinationals, open markets for U.S. goods, the usual.

JVH: Bill Clinton recently excused himself for 
the US trade policy during his presidency ? which 
forced Haitian farmers off land and undercut 
Haiti?s ability to feed itself. Was Clinton?s 
move a hopeful change of heart by one of the key players in Haiti?

RR: Bill Clinton loves to apologize. While he is 
apologizing, he is committing new actions for 
which he will have to excuse himself in the years 
to come. The pressure to privatize, for instance, 
continues up to this day in Haiti. The democratic 
movements are still under attack. The most 
popular political party in Haiti, Lavalas, is 
still banned from elections. The tiny Haitian 
elite is still Clinton?s major economic partner 
in Haiti. Former President Aristide is still in 
forced exile. The apologies will have to continue.

JVH: The Haitian democratic icon Aristide still 
lives in forced exile. Did you feel popular 
demand for his return during your stay in Haiti?

RR: It is highly ironic that George W. Bush and 
Bill Clinton can travel freely to Haiti while the 
twice-democratically elected president, 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is banished. His return 
is a big issue in Haiti and a fundamental demand 
of the democratic movement. For instance, over 
20,000 women have already signed a petition demanding his immediate return.

How can free and fair elections be held when such 
a major spokesperson is prevented from even 
living in his homeland? How can the voices of the 
majority be heard when their political party is 
banned and their political representatives are 
silenced? In a period of such trauma and 
difficulty, Aristide?s return would provide hope 
and sustenance. We heard this everywhere, repeatedly.

JVH: Dramatic living conditions, a democracy 
smothered, and a two time elected former 
president banished: is the near future looking as 
bleak as this list indicates or has your trip suggested otherwise?

RR: There are two stories in Haiti which are 
happening simultaneously. One is the top-down 
reconstruction led by the US and the UN. This 
continues the elite model of development in Haiti 
of the past, repackaged since the earthquake. The 
other story involves the mobilizing efforts at 
the grassroots level. This is the hope for Haiti, 
the real democratic vision that is emerging from 
the disaster in Haiti. Numerous organizations 
responded to the quake by very visibly providing 
relief and support while continuing to fight for 
democracy. That changed the political dynamics in 
Haiti. On the grassroots level, there is a lot to be hopeful for.

Johnny Van Hove is a Belgian freelance 
journalist, a media activist, and a PhD student 
in the field of American Studies at the 
University of Bremen. He publishes for a wide 
range of critical media, such as the Belgian 
webpaper Dewereldmorgen.be. He is also the 
co-author the Belgian Indymedia reader Media and 
Racism. Read other articles by Johnny.




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522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 10:58:21 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:58:21 -0700
Subject: [News] British Governement Refuses Iroquois Admittance;
 Will Miss  Tournament
Message-ID: <mailman.70.1279205970.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Breaking News: British Governement Refuses Iroquois Admittance; Will 
Miss Tournament

Terry Foy July 14th, 2010
http://ht.ly/2bCGT

After four days of scrambling and hope, the Iroquois Nationals will 
not be traveling to Manchester to participate in the 2010 FIL World 
Championships, 
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iI149z8c0uBRphmB54w06NhPQlNwD9GV305G0>the 
Associated Press reported Wednesday night.


The report cited a British Consulate spokeswoman who said that the 
United Kingdom would only allow travel on passports they consider 
valid, and the Haudenosaunee-issued documents don't meet that standard.

The news comes only hours after the U.S. State Department 
<http://insidelacrosse.com/news/2010/07/14/breaking-iroquois-has-us-clearance-awaiting-visas-canadian-clearance>granted 
a one-time exception to the team's party, guaranteeing them 
admittance back into the country upon their return. The decision came 
too late Wednesday for the party to procure the proper clearance from 
Canadian and British officials 
<http://insidelacrosse.com/news/2010/07/14/iroquois-nationals-miss-4-pm-wednesday-flight-jfk>in 
order to board their 4 p.m. flight, but the hope was they'd be able 
to arrive in time for a rescheduled start to their tournament on 
Friday. According to the 
<http://2010worldlacrosse.com/news/1/97>Federation of International 
Lacrosse (FIL), if the Iroquois do not arrive in time for Thursday's 
7:30 p.m., game against England, they would forfeit.

The FIL said Thursday that England's game with Iroquois has been 
changed to a scrimmage against Germany. Sources within the Iroquois 
delegation say they're still fighting to get to England, and they may 
be trying to set up a scrimmage on Long Island Thursday night if they 
still can't get out of New York.

It's a disappointing next step in a highly publicized, nearly 
week-long process that's received not only 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/us/13lacrosse.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Iroquois&st=cse>national 
media attention, but a large outcry from the 
<http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/global/Iroquois-Nationals-tournament-departure-delayed-by-British-travel-snafu-98061744.html>Native 
American and 
<http://insidelacrosse.com/news/2010/07/12/iroquois-nationals-visa-issues-continue-immigration-cowboys-refuse-entry-team>international 
lacrosse communities, both of whom cited the hypocrisy of preventing 
the team from taking part in a world championship that honored the 
legacy of their ancestors and the game they invented.

Continue to check back to InsideLacrosse.com as we follow this 
developing story.





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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 12:13:51 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:13:51 -0700
Subject: [News] Iranian scientist claims US torture
Message-ID: <mailman.79.1279210448.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Iranian scientist claims US torture

Thursday, July 15, 2010
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/07/201071502034599551.html

Alireza Ronaghi reports from Tehran on Shahram Amiri's accusations of 
US torture

An Iranian man who said he was kidnapped by the US has arrived home 
in Tehran, vowing to reveal more details of his claimed abduction 
while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia last year.

Arriving back in Iran early on Thursday, Amiri, 32, flashed a victory 
sign as he was given a tearful welcome by relatives and friends at 
Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport.

Speaking to Al Jazeera during a transit stop in Qatar, Shahram Amiri 
said he was interrogated for 14 months by US agents who refused to 
allow him contact with his family, but that he "never cracked" and 
had not revealed any secret information about Iran's nuclear programme.

Washington has denied the claims, saying Amiri had lived freely in 
the US, had himself reached out to US officials, and was free to come and go.

Iranian authorities have repeatedly said that Amiri was seized by the 
CIA during a visit to Saudi Arabia last year, and Iran's state 
television has broadcast the text of what it said was an interview 
with him in which he claims he was abducted at gunpoint by US agents 
while attending the Hajj pilgrimage.

"They gave me a shot which made me unconscious and then transferred 
me to the US onboard a military plane," Amiri said in Tehran, before 
making allegations that he was tortured during interrogations in the US.

"Within the first two months, I was subjected to fierce mental and 
psychological torture by agents and interrogators from the US Central 
Intelligence Agency."

Speaking to Al Jazeera during his journey back to Iran, Amiri said he 
had been forced by US authorities to say in a video released on the 
internet that he was enjoying life in the state of Arizona.

Al Jazeera has not been able to independently verify Amiri's allegations.

'Help of the Saudis'

Amiri said he was "kidnapped with the help of the Saudis" and had 
been "put under a number of pressures" while held in the US.

He said he had been dropped off at the Iranian interests section of 
the Pakistan embassy in Washington on Monday after US agents decided 
they had no more need of him.

Amiri's disappearance has been linked to rising international 
pressure over Tehran's controversial nuclear programme, which Iran 
says is for peaceful purposes but many countries led by the United 
States say the country is pursuing atomic weapons.

"Behind the scenes this was politically motivated and in my time in 
the United States where I was held against my will, they asked me for 
a series of documents ... they wanted to use this as a claim against 
the Islamic Republic, so they could advance their own political 
agenda," Amiri told Al Jazeera.

Iran's semi-official Fars news agency, reporting on the case, said 
that Amiri had been handed over to the Pakistani embassy by US 
agents, calling it a defeat for US intelligence services.

"Because of Iran's media and intelligence activities, the American 
government had to back down and hand over Amiri to the embassy on 
Monday night," Fars said.

The disappearance of Amiri, who worked at a university linked with 
Iran's Revolutionary Guards, sparked accusations by Iranian officials 
that he had been kidnapped by the CIA.

US contact

Washington has denied the allegations as well as speculation in the 
US media that Amiri had defected to the US and was working with the CIA.

The speculation was further compounded when a man claiming to be 
Amiri was shown in two different pieces of video footage on June 7 - 
one claiming he was kidnapped by US agents and the other saying he 
was studying in the city of Tucson in Arizona.

These videos were followed by a third a few weeks later in which the 
man said he had escaped from the custody of US spies in Virginia.

US officials consistently denied Amiri's kidnapping but on Tuesday, 
PJ Crowley, the state department spokesman, confirmed that Washington 
had been in touch with him.

"The United States government has maintained contact with him," he 
said, adding that Amiri "has been here for some time, I'm not going 
to specify for how long".

Crowley also refused to comment on whether Amiri had provided 
Washington with intelligence.

But the Washington Post, citing US officials, reported on Thursday 
that Amiri was paid more than $5m by the CIA to provide information 
on Iran's nuclear programme.

Shrouded in mystery

Al Jazeera's Alireza Ronaghi, reporting from Tehran after attending a 
news conference addressed by Amiri, said: "It seems like the Iranians 
have finally decided to deny the assumption that Mr Amiri had any 
information that could reveal anything about Iran's nuclear programme 
to sort of try and lift all the possibilities about Amiri's 
importance that could probably lead to his defection."

Our correspondent said he had talked to Amiri's wife and even she did 
not know whether he was alive or dead.

"So no one knew what he has been doing apart from his own claims 
about what he had been doing and what happened to him," Ronaghi said.

"We have no other source or no other reliable commentary to get a 
glimpse of what he had been doing in the last couple of months, so it 
is very important for Iranian authorities to get to the bottom of it.

"Iranians have to go through very lengthy sessions with Amiri and 
that has just started."




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 12:24:23 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:24:23 -0700
Subject: [News] US university suspends Muslim student group for Palestine
 protest
Message-ID: <mailman.82.1279211085.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

US university suspends Muslim student group for Palestine protest

Brian Napoletano, The Electronic Intifada, 14 July 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11374.shtml


In response to intense political pressure by multiple pro-Zionist 
organizations, the administration at the University of California, 
Irvine (UCI) recently decided to suspend Muslim students' right to 
assemble and practice their faith together on campus. Alleging that 
emails anonymously "leaked" to the university prove that the Muslim 
Student Union was responsible for a protest of Israeli Ambassador 
Michael Oren's campus appearance by eight UCI students, the 
administration plans to suspend the more than 250-member Muslim 
Student Union for a year beginning in September, and place it under 
intense scrutiny and disciplinary probation if the student group is 
allowed to re-apply for recognition in the fall of 2011.

The student group is appealing this ban, contending that the MSU did 
not sponsor the protest, and that the students arrested for 
interrupting Oren's speech were acting as individuals. Members have 
also challenged UCI's decision to impose what their attorney Reem 
Salahi has described as "nothing but collective punishment" by 
suspending the entire group over a political protest.

Pointing to sustained efforts by powerful organizations like the 
Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Organization of America, many 
are contending that UCI is allowing outside organizations to decide 
how it treats its students. Many of these organizations have publicly 
described their role in pushing the administration to suspend the 
student group, and have announced their intentions to undertake 
similar efforts on other campuses where students are organizing in 
defense of Palestinian rights.

While delivering a presentation on US-Israeli relations in February, 
Oren was interrupted several times by students who were outraged by 
his disregard for human rights and his attacks on the UN-commissioned 
Goldstone report. As a previous military spokesman for Israel, Oren 
defended Israel's 2006 invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, its winter 
2008-09 attack on Gaza, and touted his own role as a paratrooper 
during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon in the mainstream media. 
Although Oren eventually finished his presentation, the university 
had the 11 students who interrupted him arrested (eight were from 
UCI, three were from UC Riverside), and the eight UCI students were 
subsequently brought before the University Office of Judicial 
Affairs, which informed them that they may face criminal charges in 
addition to any other punishments the university decides to impose. 
Although they are all members of the MSU, the students maintained 
that the protest was not a MSU activity, and that they were acting as 
individuals 
("<http://collegelife.freedomblogging.com/2010/02/08/israeli-ambassador-xxxx-at-uci/15647/>11 
Arrested for Disrupting Israeli Ambassador," The Orange County 
Register, 8 February 2010).

The university publicly condemned the students who protested and, in 
response to demands from the Jewish Federation Orange County (JFOC) 
and other organizations initiated a Student Judiciary Review of the 
MSU. While this review was underway, someone anonymously delivered a 
collection of emails and other documents to the JFOC, the 
Investigative Project on Terrorism and the UCI that they claimed to 
have hacked from the MSU's email account.

Despite its highly-suspect nature and unknown source, Lisa Cornish, 
head of the Judiciary Review and Senior Executive Director of Student 
Housing, based her findings almost exclusively on this "evidence" 
when she concluded that the MSU had violated parts of the Code of 
Conduct by "plan[ning] every detail of the disruptions" and then 
"covering up" its involvement by claiming that the protests were not 
an MSU activity. In her 27 May letter to the students, Cornish said 
that she planned to have the group's recognition revoked on 1 
September, require the members to complete fifty hours of community 
service, and have the group placed on disciplinary probation for an 
additional year if it was permitted to re-register in the fall of 
2011 
("<http://files.onset.freedom.com/ocregister/Oren_Decision_Document.pdf>Letter 
to Muslim Student Union Officers" [PDF]). She did not, however, 
comment on whether the university planned to file criminal charges 
against the eight students who were actually responsible for the protests.

In light of these possible criminal charges, MSU's attorney Salahi 
was unable to discuss the alleged evidence in detail. However, she 
maintained that the protesters were not acting on behalf of the MSU. 
She also said that much of the evidence presented was deeply flawed, 
and that the university's punishment was entirely inappropriate, 
arguing that "all Muslim students on campus have been punished for 
the actions of a few."

Salahi also pointed out the central role the MSU plays in the Muslim 
student community. While advocacy for Palestinian rights is one of 
their more frequently noticed activities, the MSU has also worked 
with different student and cultural groups on several social justice 
movements and community service projects. Last spring, UCI's Cross 
Cultural Center recognized the MSU's contribution to the university 
by awarding it the Social Justice Award.

The student group also facilitates daily and weekly prayers on 
campus, offers religious classes and organizes social events. Given 
its centrality to the Muslim student community, many students feel 
that their right to participate in the campus community as Muslims is 
being undermined. As newly-elected MSU President Asaad Triana 
observed, "depriving Muslim students a venue to associate jeopardizes 
their rights under the First Amendment and is an act of 
marginalization at a time when Muslim students and Muslim youth 
already feel besieged."

The university's decision to suspend the entire MSU has raised 
several questions about the role that outside pressure from several 
well-known anti-Palestinian organizations played in its decision. 
Husam Ayloush, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic 
Relations, observed that the disruption of Oren's speech "was nothing 
but a peaceful and symbolic protest of the Israeli ambassador at 
UCI," suggesting that the university's response "appears to be 
politically motivated to silence any future peaceful and legitimate 
criticism of Israel's brutal practices."

Much of this political motivation came from well-known Zionist 
organizations like the Jewish Federation Orange County (JFOC), the 
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Zionist Organization of America 
(ZOA) -- all of which openly demanded that the university suspend the 
entire student group after February's protest.

The JFOC began attacking the MSU for its alleged "anti-Semitism" when 
the student group first began publicly criticizing Israeli policy 
nearly a decade ago. The JFOC immediately allied with campus groups 
like Hillel to pressure the administration to silence criticism of 
Israel, claiming that it intimidated Jewish students. The JFOC soon 
partnered with the ADL, which began to put even more media and 
political pressure on the administration to take action against the MSU.

The ZOA also joined in the effort, and began pressuring various 
contacts within the University of California administration to 
suspend the MSU. In a personal letter to UC President Mark Yudof, for 
instance, ZOA President Morton Klein condemned the UCI's MSU along 
with the UC Santa Cruz's Committee for Justice in Palestine, and 
accused the chancellors of both universities of being "grossly 
deficient" in their efforts to silence criticism of Israel 
("<http://www.zoa.org//media/user/documents/Publ/letterUCPresidentYudof8Aug08.pdf>Letter 
to Mark Yudof, Re: UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz," 8 August 2008 [PDF]).

Outraged by the protests against Oren, virtually every Zionist 
organization involved began calling for the MSU's suspension in 
February. Although the ZOA placed itself at odds with several other 
organizations when it initiated a Jewish boycott of UCI, the 
different factions still managed to coordinate a fairly organized 
campaign to have the student group suspended.

The campaign against the MSU became so intense that its vice 
president, Hadeer Soliman, described it as an outright attack on the 
students' "most basic rights of Freedom of Association," and said 
that the MSU's antagonists are "not seeking justice but rather censorship."

As opposition to Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people 
continues to grow, its apologists in the United States are focusing 
more of their energy and resources on silencing dissent on college 
campuses. While personal attacks on faculty are fairly common, the 
only other time an entire student group has faced punishment for a 
political protest was when UC Berkeley temporarily suspended its 
Students for Justice in Palestine group during an investigation in 
2002. As MSU spokesperson Mahdis Keshavarz pointed out, the extent to 
which the university has allowed outside organizations to dictate its 
treatment of its students is both unprecedented and alarming. "By 
allowing an outside institution to come onto campus and influence its 
students standing," she explained, "UCI is failing to protect them 
and setting a dangerous precedent."

Such a precedent appears to be exactly what supporters of Israel are 
hoping for, as many of the organizations involved expressed their 
conviction that the MSU's suspension will have a significant impact 
on other campuses. In its press release, the ZOA said the ruling 
"sends a powerful message to other colleges and universities ... 
making it clear that this bigotry against Jews and the Jewish State 
will not be tolerated" 
("<http://www.jewishorangecounty.org/page.aspx?id=222251> Muslim 
Student Union Suspended at UC Irvine"). The subtext to this message, 
it seems, is that all pretenses of academic freedom on the nation's 
campuses have finally been discarded, and further objections to 
Israeli apartheid will be met with swift retaliation.

Describing the UCI's vilification of its Muslim students as yet 
another "criminalization of Arab and Muslim political speech which 
has permeated the American university system in defiance of 
principles of racial and religious equality," the US Campaign for the 
Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel recently released a statement 
of solidarity that condemned the administration's attack on students' 
"rights of free speech" and calling on them to "restore the integrity 
of the academy" by repealing its ban 
("<http://usacbi.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/statement-condemning-disciplinary-action-against-the-irvine-11-and-the-recommendation-to-suspend-the-uc-irvine-muslim-student-union/>Statement 
Condemning Disciplinary Action against the Irvine 11 ...," 13 July 2010).

UCI's decision to punish one of its student groups for a political 
protest is a direct threat to academic freedom and the right of 
students to organize and speak freely. As more right-wing 
organizations begin to target the academy, students in other social 
justice movements may soon find themselves under attack by outside 
organizations. While the precedent set by the UCI's decision could 
intimidate some students into submission, others may respond by 
building stronger solidarity with students engaged in different and 
related struggles for social justice at home and abroad.

Brian Napoletano is a member of the International Socialist 
Organization and the former Public Relations officer for Purdue 
University Students for Justice in Palestine. He has previously 
written for The Palestine Chronicle, MRZine, and Socialist Worker. He 
can be reached via email at b.napoletano A T gmail D O T com.





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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 16:22:41 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:22:41 -0700
Subject: [News] Danziger Bridge is Just the Beginning: NOPD Corruption and
 Violence
Message-ID: <mailman.92.1279225383.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Danziger Bridge is Just the Beginning

Six New Orleans Police Charged in Post-Katrina Killings, Activists 
Say Deeper Change is Needed

By Jordan Flaherty, <http://floodlines.org>floodlines.org
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-flaherty/six-new-orleans-police-ch_b_647771.html

This week, federal officials charged six current and former New 
Orleans police officers in connection with the killing of civilians 
in the days after Hurricane Katrina. The six are not only accused of 
murder but also of conspiring to hide their crime through secret 
meetings, planting evidence, inventing witnesses, false arrests, and 
perjury. Four of the officers may face the death penalty.

While the details of their charges are shocking, much of the media 
has missed the real story: corruption and violence are endemic to the 
NOPD, and wider systemic change is needed not just in police 
personnel, but in the city's overall criminal justice system.

Days of Violence

In the days after the flooding of New Orleans, police officers were 
told they were defending a city under siege and were given tacit 
permission to use deadly force at their own discretion. At the time, 
no one in power seemed to be interested in looking into the details 
of who was killed and why.

For more than three years, these post-Katrina murders were ignored by 
the city's District Attorney, the Republican U.S. Attorney, and even 
the local media. But in late 2008 ProPublica and The Nation published 
the results of an 18-month investigation by journalist A.C. Thompson. 
Under new leadership, and responding to requests from New Orleans 
advocates, the Department of Justice began its own inquiries soon 
after Thompson's report.

FBI agents reconstructed crime scenes, interviewed witnesses and 
seized officers' computers. Disturbing revelations have continued to 
unfold since then, as the mounting evidence against them has forced a 
growing number of cops to confess.

Among the most shocking cases:

On September 2, four days after Katrina made landfall, Henry Glover 
was shot by one officer, then apparently taken hostage by other 
officers who either killed him directly or burned him alive. His 
charred remains were found weeks later.

Also on September 2, Danny Brumfield Sr., a 45 year old man stranded 
with his family at the New Orleans Convention Center, was 
deliberately hit by a patrol car, then shot in the back by police in 
front of scores of witnesses as he tried to wave down the officers to 
ask for help.

On September 4, 2005, on New Orleans' Danziger Bridge, a group of 
police officers drove up to several unarmed civilians who were 
fleeing their flooded homes and opened fire. Two people were killed, 
including a mentally challenged man named Ronald Madison, and four 
were seriously injured. Madison was shot in the back by officer 
Robert Faulcon, and officer Kenneth Bowen then rushed up and kicked 
and stomped on him, apparently until he was dead.

Faulcon and Bowen were among those charged this week in a 27-count 
indictment that lays out the disturbing chain of events on the bridge.

The post-Katrina killings have also led investigators into further 
inquiries. The feds have already announced that they are looking into 
at least eight cases, including incidents that occurred in the summer 
before Katrina and in the years after. And as high-ranking officers 
confess to manufacturing evidence, their confessions bring doubt to 
scores of other cases they have worked on.

Endemic Violence

A coalition of criminal justice activists called Community United for 
Change (CUC) has asked for federal investigations of dozens of other 
police murders committed over the past three decades, which advocates 
say have never been properly examined. Activists named a wide range 
of cases, from the death of 25-year-old Jenard Thomas, who was shot 
by police in front of his father on March 24, 2005; to Sherry 
Singleton, shot by police in 1980 while she was naked in a bathtub, 
in front of her four year old child.

Several parents and other family members of victims of police 
violence have joined in protests and community forums sponsored by 
CUC. The parents of Adolph Grimes III, who was shot 14 times by cops 
on New Year's day in 2009, are among those who have spoken out. "We 
want those officers incarcerated, so they can live with it like we 
live with it," said Grimes' father.

"This represents a real opportunity to raise some fundamental 
questions about the nature of police and what they do," said Malcolm 
Suber, project director with the New Orleans chapter of the American 
Friends Service Committee and one of the organizers who formed 
Community United for Change.

Civil rights attorney Tracie Washington has been among those leading 
the call for federal intervention in the department. "It is time for 
the U.S. government, through the Justice Department's Office of Civil 
Rights, to step in and step up," she said. "We need a solution that 
addresses the systemic nature of the problem."

Justice Department officials have indicated that they agree on the 
need for federal assistance. "Criminal prosecutions alone, I have 
learned, are not enough to change the culture of a police 
department," said Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu has also said he agrees on the need for federal 
supervision. In a letter to Attorney General Holder, Landrieu wrote, 
"It is clear that nothing short of a complete transformation is 
necessary and essential to ensure safety for the citizens of New Orleans."

However, many activists fear that Mayor Landrieu is speaking out in 
support of reform so he can maintain a level of control over the 
changes dictated by the feds. They are critical of Landrieu's choices 
so far, such as his selection of an insider - NOPD veteran Ronal 
Serpas - for the job of police chief, and have expressed concern that 
he will not break with the department's troubled history. "This is 
lukewarm reform," says Rosana Cruz, the associate director of 
V.O.T.E., an organization that seeks to build power and civic 
engagement for formerly incarcerated people. "This is reaching the 
lowest possible bar that we could possibly set."

Beyond Bad Apples

While some form of federal supervision of the department seems 
likely, Malcolm Suber doesn't think federal oversight is enough.

"I don't think that we can call on a government that murders people 
all over the world every day to come and supervise a local police 
department," He says. For Suber, federal control will not offer the 
wider, more systemic changes needed in other aspects of the system. 
While Suber wants more federal investigations of police murders, he 
wants these investigations to go hand in hand with community 
oversight and control of the department.

While activists may disagree on the role they see for the federal 
government, one thing Washington, Suber and Cruz agree on is that the 
problem runs deeper than police department corruption. They say any 
solution needs to reach beyond the department to other facets of the 
system like the city's elected coroner, the District Attorney's 
office, the U.S. Attorney and the city's Independent Police Monitor, 
who many see as limited by not having the ability to perform its own 
investigations.

"We have a coroner who always finds police were justified," said 
Suber, referring to Frank Minyard, an 80-year-old jazz trumpeter who 
is trained as a gynecologist. Minyard has been city coroner since 
1974, and has been the frequent subject of complaints from activists, 
who contend that he has mislabeled police killings. "We've had 
independent coroners, forensic doctors come after him," said Suber, 
"And we found that basically all of his finding were bogus. Just made up."

Henry Glover, last seen in the custody of police then found burned to 
death in a car, was not flagged by the coroner's office as a 
potential homicide. In another case now under federal investigation, 
witnesses say police beat Raymond Robair to death. The coroner ruled 
that he "fell down or was pushed." This "fall" broke four ribs and 
caused massive internal injury, including a ruptured spleen.

"If you ask any attorneys who have handled cases of police killings," 
continued Suber, "When they have hired independent doctors to go 
after our coroner, nine times out of ten he's wrong."

Activists also complain that the city's District Attorney Leon 
Cannizzaro has been slow to pursue cases of police violence. "The 
district attorney just does not file charges," Suber said. "When it's 
involving police, he finds no crimes committed." Republican US 
Attorney Jim Letten has also failed, Suber added. "A number of 
community groups have gone and met with him, asked him to investigate 
and he didn't do anything."

Organizers have put forward a range of proposals for the reforms they 
would like to see, including institutional support for community-led 
programs like CopWatch, the incorporation of a system for language 
interpretation, and a more powerful Independent Police Monitor. But 
they all agree that not just the department, but the entire system 
needs fundamental change, and that change needs to come from outside 
of city government. "How you gonna get the wolf to watch over the 
chicken coop?" asks Adolph Grimes, Jr. "It's the system itself that 
is corrupted."

An earlier version of this article originally appeared on 
<http://www.colorlines.com/archives/2010/05/the_long_rap_sheet_of_new_orleans_cops.html>colorlines.com.

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and 
a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first 
writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and 
his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in 
a range of outlets including the New York Times, Mother Jones, and 
Argentina's Clarin newspaper. He has produced news segments for 
Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now! and appeared as a guest on 
CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, and Keep Hope Alive with the 
Reverend Jesse Jackson. Haymarket Books has just released his new 
book, FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena 
Six. He can be reached at 
<mailto:neworleans at leftturn.org>neworleans at leftturn.org.

More information about Floodlines can be found at 
<http://floodlines.org/>floodlines.org.  Floodlines will also be 
featured on the Community and Resistance Tour this fall. For more 
information on the tour, see 
<http://communityandresistance.wordpress.com/>communityandresistance.wordpress.com.





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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 18:10:46 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:10:46 -0700
Subject: [News] A New Wave of Criminalization Against Social Movements in
 Ecuador
Message-ID: <mailman.103.1279231984.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

A New Wave of Criminalization Against Social Movements in Ecuador


Written by Jennifer Moore
Wednesday, 14 July 2010 17:51
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2590-a-new-wave-of-criminalization-against-social-movements-in-ecuador-

[]
Ecuador's anti-mining and indigenous movements 
are denouncing renewed attempts by the Correa 
Administration to criminalize dissent. Over 
thirty people, including top leaders of the 
national indigenous movement, are being 
investigated for allegations including terrorism 
and sabotage as a result of their participation 
in protests related to controversies over gold 
and copper mining, as well as water and indigenous rights.

President of the Confederation of Indigenous 
Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) Marlon Sant? 
and several others were summoned just days after 
a Summit of the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) was 
held in northern Ecuador at which indigenous 
rights were at the top of the agenda. The CONAIE 
protested the June 24 and 25 summit, questioning 
why ALBA would address indigenous rights without 
representation from important indigenous organizations such as theirs.

Coming on the heels of an eleven-day march from 
the Amazon to the capital of Quito in 
commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the 
first major indigenous uprising in Ecuador, 
several thousand people participated. They wanted 
to deliver a communiqu? to indigenous President 
Evo Morales of Bolivia who was present for the 
ALBA meeting, detailing their concerns about 
being excluded, as well as worries about 
market-based solutions to climate change and 
continued dependence on extractive industry that 
President Correa is pursuing and which they fear 
puts at risk at risk the lives and livelihoods of 
affected indigenous and campesino communities. 
When it became clear that they would not be able 
to meet with Morales, they retreated and gathered in a nearby park.

According to lawyer and professor Mario Melo, who 
cites documents pertaining to the preliminary 
investigation, Sant? and others have been accused 
of terrorism and sabotage for breaking through a 
police line and for a pair of handcuffs that 
allegedly went missing during the scuffle. 
Incredulous that this would be enough to warrant 
a charge of terrorism, Melo believes that the 
criminal investigations are meant ?to intimidate 
and demobilize the organizations and their leaders.? (1)

National Assembly Member of the indigenous 
Pachakutik party Lourdes Tib?n also questioned 
how it is possible that the indigenous leaders 
could be charged in this way when the National 
Assembly just passed a resolution to declare June 
21st a civic day of commemoration for ?the great 
contributions that the indigenous movement has 
made over the last twenty years.? She recalls a 
situation from 2007 in which a provincially 
elected leader from the Pachakutik party was 
similarly charged following protests related to 
redistribution of oil revenue and then later found innocent. (2)

Marlon Sant? calls the rationale for the 
investigations ?ridiculous,? but affirms that he 
will participate in the legal process. (3) He 
adds, however, that ?there are underlying issues 
to be debated and we won't be silenced by these 
investigations.? (4) Tensions between the 
national government and the national indigenous 
movement have been building over the last couple 
of years. In recent months, the CONAIE, in 
alliance with other indigenous organizations 
including the National Federation of Indigenous, 
Campesino and Afro-Ecuadorian Organizations 
(FENOCIN) and the Ecuadorian Federation of 
Evangelical Indigenous (FEINE), have been in an 
ongoing dispute with the national government and 
legislative assembly over a proposed new water law. (5)

For his part, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa 
accuses the indigenous leaders of violence, 
saying, ?It's impossible to dialogue with [such 
people].? Although Correa spearheaded the 
Declaration of Otavalo, (6) signed by ALBA 
leaders, which promises to build societies that 
respect the rights of indigenous peoples and 
those of African descent and which ratifies their 
commitment to the UN Declaration on the Rights of 
Indigenous Peoples, he dismisses CONAIE's 
demands, saying they just want to bring him down. 
He warned CONAIE's leadership against 
interpreting their charges as political 
persecution and says, ?Here, like in Venezuela 
and Bolivia, there are various groups conspiring against our governments.? (7)

The number of people facing serious criminal 
investigations, however, has grown in recent 
weeks. In addition to national indigenous leaders 
under investigation, about thirty activists and 
community leaders in central and southern 
provinces are being processed for similarly grave 
allegations in relation to longstanding conflicts 
with Canadian- and now Chinese-financed gold and 
mining companies. In two cases, charges of 
terrorism and sabotage pertain to recent protests 
against gold mining operations. Another case from 
2006-2007 involving twenty activists was also reopened.

Going back on past advances

The situation represents a step back for the 
small Andean nation that enshrined the right to 
protest, rights for nature and the right to water 
within its 2008 Political Constitution. It is 
also fitting to recall that the National 
Constituent Assembly granted amnesty in March 
2008 to over 350 activists facing a range of 
criminal charges as a result of their opposition 
to mining, oil and hydroelectric projects. 
Political allies, however, such as then President 
of the National Constituent Assembly Alberto 
Acosta, who helped bring about the amnesty and 
who backed struggles for expanded rights within 
the constitution, have grown distant from 
Correa's Alianza Pa?z (Country Alliance) political movement.

Ecuadorian human rights and environmental 
organizations deemed March 14, 2008, when the 
National Constituent Assembly issued the amnesty, 
a ?transcendental day.? (8) The then Constituent 
Assembly President Alberto Acosta called the 
decision ?a very clear message that the 
manipulation of the justice system in order to 
exert pressure on certain social processes cannot 
be permitted.? (9) The official press release 
referred to activists as ?compatriots? who are 
?leading protests in defense of their communities 
and nature, in the face of natural resource 
exploitation projects.? (10) Today, Alberto 
Acosta, also past Minister of Mines and Energy 
under Correa, calls accusations of terrorism and 
sabotage against activists, ?tremendously 
shameful,? adding that ?they have no basis in 
justice or a democratic judicial system.? (11)

Also under renewed threat are organizations that 
support social movements who question the 
country's economic development model. In March 
2009, the Quito-based environmental organization 
Acci?n Ecol?gica (Ecological Action) had its 
doors temporarily closed when the government 
revoked its legal status, sparking national and 
international outcry. More recently, during a 
national radio address earlier this month, Correa 
issued a new warning to organizations that 
receive international support: ?These little 
gringos (North Americans) come here with their 
bellies full to convince the indigenous that they 
shouldn't extract oil, nor operate mines. They 
give them money, achieve their goal and then go, 
leaving the indigenous more poor than ever 
before.? Correa suggested that those who 
intervene in the indigenous movement's struggle 
could be expelled from the country. (12)

Correa's suggestion that Ecuador will be left 
impoverished without mining echoes earlier public 
relations campaigns by Canadian-financed mining 
companies in Ecuador, such as Corriente Resources 
(recently sold to a Chinese joint venture) whose 
?Fair Deal? and ?Poor without Copper? slogans 
were once broadcast on prime-time television and 
distributed with in national publications. The 
difference today is that Correa promotes greater 
state control and redistribution of benefits.

Vague promises that gold and copper mining will 
be environmentally responsible, however, still 
fail to reassure indigenous and non-indigenous 
communities at the local level who are concerned 
about the potential impacts of gold and copper 
mining on forests and water, and thus on their 
lives and livelihoods. In other words, they 
believe that with mining they could be 
impoverished. ?I?ve heard Rafael Correa?s 
discourse,? said Marlon Sant? in a recent 
interview with Canadian researcher Jeffrey R. 
Webber, ?that we?re sitting on a mountain of gold 
and that it would be stupid not to exploit it. 
But this is short-term thinking, thinking only in 
the present. What about our future?? (13)

Entrenches conflicts

Unfortunately, rather than helping to address 
points of difference over natural resource 
management between the indigenous movement and 
the central government, and between local 
conflicts and national economic imperatives, the 
current wave of criminal investigations against 
social movement leaders like Sant? represents a 
further entrenchment of these conflicts. With the 
balance of power currently in state and company 
hands, whereas mining companies for instance are 
guaranteed protection of their operations under 
the new mining law, these accusations serve to 
marginalize the voices of indigenous and 
campesino organizations that historically have 
had to struggle for any rights that they have 
won, urging them to keep fighting.

Jennifer Moore is a Canadian independent 
journalist who has been reporting from Ecuador for several years.

Notes:
    * Melo, Mario, 1 July 2010, ?Organizaciones 
Ind?genas ecuatorianas en indagaci?n previa por el delito de terrorismo?
    * CONAIE, July 1st 2010, ?Pachakutik denuncia 
criminalizaci?n del movimiento ind?gena?
    * CONAIE, July 1st 2010, Video recording of 
press conference; 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghx_Zkj5Wgs>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghx_Zkj5Wgs 

    * CONAIE, July 7th 2010, Video recording of 
press conference in Quito, Ecuador; 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1Bnt4TBFHM>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1Bnt4TBFHM 

    * See Upside Down World, May 7th 2010, 
?Ecuador: The Debate in the Streets? 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2483-ecuador-the-debate-in-the-streets->http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2483-ecuador-the-debate-in-the-streets- 
and Upside Down World, May 18th 2010, ?Decision 
delayed over Ecuador's new water law? 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2495--decision-delayed-over-ecuadors-new-water-law>http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2495--decision-delayed-over-ecuadors-new-water-law<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2495--decision-delayed-over-ecuadors-new-water-law> 
for more information
    * ALBA, June 25th 2010, ?Declaraci?n de 
Otavalo: Cumbre ALBA-TCP con Autoridades 
Indigenas y Afrodescendientes?; 
<http://www.alianzabolivariana.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6544>http://www.alianzabolivariana.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6544 

    * El Ciudadano, June 26th 2010, ?Presidente 
Correa; El di?logo est? agotado con la dirigencia 
ind?gena?; 
<http://www.elciudadano.gov.ec/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14317:presidente-correa-el-dialogo-esta-agotado-con-cierta-dirigencia-indigena&catid=1:actualidad&Itemid=42>http://www.elciudadano.gov.ec/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14317:presidente-correa-el-dialogo-esta-agotado-con-cierta-dirigencia-indigena&catid=1:actualidad&Itemid=42 

    * Ecumenical Human Rights Commission (CEDHU), 
Accion Ecologica and the Regional Foundation for 
Human Rights Assistance (INREDH), March 14th 2008, ?Carta de Reconocimiento?
    * Alberto Acosta, March 13th 2008, Press conference
    * Sala de Prensa Jose Peralta, March 14th 
2008, Boletin 633, ?Alrededor de 357 ciudadanos 
se beneficiaron de este recurso?
    * Upside Down World. Jeffrey R. Webber, July 
12th 2010, ?Ecuador's Economy Under Rafael 
Correa: Twenty-First Century Socialism or the New 
Extractivism? - An Interview with Alberto 
Acosta?; 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2586-ecuadors-economy-under-rafael-correa-twenty-first-century-socialism-or-the-new-extractivism--an-inteview-with-alberto-acosta>http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2586-ecuadors-economy-under-rafael-correa-twenty-first-century-socialism-or-the-new-extractivism--an-inteview-with-alberto-acosta 

    * Hoy, July 10th 2010, ?ONGs que intervengan 
en pol?tica ser?n expulsadas, dice Correa?; 
<http://www.hoy.com.ec/noticias-ecuador/ongs-que-intervengan-en-politica-seran-expulsadas-dice-correa-418108.html>http://www.hoy.com.ec/noticias-ecuador/ongs-que-intervengan-en-politica-seran-expulsadas-dice-correa-418108.html 

    * Global Research, Jeffrey R. Webber, July 
13th 2010, ?Indigenous Struggle, Ecology, and 
Capitalist Resource Extraction in Ecuador?; 
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20118>http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20118 





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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 19:40:38 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:40:38 -0700
Subject: [News] Hold on to Your Hats: This Thing's Gonna Blow!
Message-ID: <mailman.108.1279237262.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


Published on This Can't Be Happening 
(<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net>http://www.thiscantbehappening.net)


Hold on to Your Hats: This Thing's Gonna Blow!

By Anonymous
Created 07/15/2010 - 15:34
by:
Dave LIndorff

What the hell are they thinking in Washington, and down at the 
"Unified Command" in New Orleans, letting BP try to close off the oil 
volcano spewing out the top of the damaged Blowout Preventer (BOP) stack?

And what the hell is the mainstream press doing not asking about the 
clear evidence of oil or gas spewing out under pressure from cracks 
in the seafloor around the base of the BOP? (See the image of oil 
spewing from the sea floor 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2RxIQP0IBU%E2%80%9D>here 
[1].)

Sure the initial partial closing of the valves is working, but they 
haven't built up much pressure yet, and a lot could go wrong. 
seriously wrong, and there's good reason to think it will.

I made a call to the media office of the Unified Command, the office 
set up to respond to public and media inquiries about the disaster, 
which is supposedly composed of people from the US Coast Guard, other 
federal agencies, and BP. When I mentioned the videos taken by BP's 
own remote operating vehicles (ROVs) of the oil and/or gas spewing 
from cracks in the sea floor, I was told I had to call the press 
office in Houston, "because you're asking us a question about the 
sub-surface well."

But here's the thing. The press office in Houston is not run by the 
Unified Command. The people at the office there answer the phone with 
the phrase: "BP Press." They do this because they are BP employees, 
and the office is in BP headquarters.

This means if you want to know anything about the structural 
integrity of the well below the BOP, you have to get that information 
from BP, not from the government. That's the same BP that told 
government regulators that they could handle any emergency. The same 
BP that assured us when the well blew that the spill was just leaking 
1000 barrels of oil a day--a figure that appears to have been 
knowingly understated by a factor of 50 to 100.

Now, when I called BP I got a PR guy with a Brit accent named Toby 
Odone, who claimed he was "not aware of any oil leaking around the 
well itself."

He also said, "We're pretty certain that there is no oil leaking 
around the well that shouldn't be there."

How then to explain their own ROV videos, showing exactly that? Odone 
assured me he'd "get back" with an answer. So far, no answer.

Odone also said something else that was disturbing in its facileness. 
He said that the relief wells were within feet of the original bore, 
and that they had "not detected any hydrocarbons." This, he assured 
me, meant that there was no leak from the casing. But I pointed out 
that those side wells had been drilled from a mile away, on a slant, 
so that they only approached the original well during the last 
quarter mile or so from the bottom of the 18000-foot bore. They were 
nowhere near the bore during the first several miles of casing, so 
they can offer no clue as to the integrity of the bore above the 
first quarter mile or so above the oil reservoir. Odone agreed that 
this was true.

I also put a call in to the US Energy Department, which is supposedly 
monitoring the science of this disaster and which put the attempted 
shut-down of the well on hold for 48 hours earlier this week while 
seismic tests were conducted to try and determine the integrity of 
the casing that goes from the BOP down to the oil reservoir. A press 
officer at the DOE asked me to provide a link to the ROV video of the 
oil leaking from the sea bed, and promised to get back to me with an 
explanation of the department's thinking about that. So far, no 
response or explanation. Clearly, though, the Energy Department is 
worried that shutting down the flow entirely at the top of the stack 
could cause such high pressures inside the casing that it will blow a 
crack in the pipe and allow the oil and gas to push upward outside of 
the control of the pipe.

That's why they are closing the top of the pipe slowly, monitoring 
the pressure all the time. If they can shut it down and the pressure 
rises to 9000 lbs/square inch or more, which is roughly the pressure 
at which the oil is coming up from below ground, then they will know 
that the integrity of the pipe has been preserved, but if they cannot 
get the pressure to build beyond 6000 or so lbs/square inch, it would 
mean that the casing has been compromised, and they would not be able 
to shut the flow down from the top. leaving successful completion of 
a relief well as the only possible shut-down option.

But here's the question: If we can already see oil, or perhaps gas, 
blowing out of cracks around the BOP, doesn't this mean that 
somewhere below ground, the casing has already breached? And if it 
has already blown open, isn't any attempt to shut down the flow and 
build up the pressure in the well just threatening to worsen whatever 
break already exists? Especially since BP and the government say that 
this "fix," even if it works and doesn't blow the tube or burst the 
damaged BOP, is only a temporary fix, until the relief well is 
drilled and the well is plugged at the bottom. Meanwhile, instead of 
this risky attempt to shut the well at the top, they could be just 
attaching pipes to collect all the oil in tankers on the surface, at 
minimal risk to the wellhead and the casing.

Why isn't the Energy Department or the Coast Guard addressing this 
question of the threat to the well? Why has no reporter at the 
regular daily briefings hosted by retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen 
asked this question?

It seems to me a fairly safe prediction that as they crank shut the 
opening at the top of the well, the oil pushing up from below at 9000 
lbs/square inch of pressure, or even 6000 lbs/square inch of 
pressure, is going to push through whatever leaks already exist in or 
around the well casing, and will be blowing up through the ground 
around the BOP. If it's bursting out through those cracks already, 
while the pipe is wide open, there should be little doubt that it 
will burst out even more powerfully when the top of the pipe is 
capped. That's grade-school physics.

And if things do go badly, as the oil and gas blow out of the casing 
and push their way up through the fractured well hole and the poorly 
set concrete that was put down there by Halliburton to fill the well 
bore, it will widen the pathways to the surface, probably following 
new fracture lines that will have it coming out even further from the 
well hole. In no time, we will have oil spewing from a wide are of 
sea floor which will make it impossible to collect.

I don't claim to be a geologist, engineer or oil well expert, and I 
don't want to be an alarmist, but having seen the images of oil 
spewing up from the sea floor, I have enough basic scientific 
understanding to know that the casing has to have been already 
breached, and that anything that increases the pressure on that 
damaged casing is only going to make things worse.

So why are they trying to close down the well from the top?

I'm just asking, because nobody else seems to be.

----------
Source URL: 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/139>http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/139

Links:
[1] http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2RxIQP0IBU"




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 16 10:25:22 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:25:22 -0700
Subject: [News] Open Letter to the Justice for Oscar Grant Movement: Next
 Steps, Strategy and Unity
Message-ID: <mailman.124.1279290349.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


<http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2010/07/open-letter-to-justice-for-oscar-grant.html>http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2010/07/open-letter-to-justice-for-oscar-grant.html



Thursday, July 15, 2010




<http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2010/07/open-letter-to-justice-for-oscar-grant.html>An 
Open Letter to the Justice for Oscar Grant 
Movement: Suggestions on Next Steps, Strategy and Unity Building

By Kali Akuno
National Organizer - Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Director of Education, Training, and Field Operations ? US Human Rights Network

The righteous anger and indignation on graphic 
display in Oakland, California Thursday, July 8th 
at the mockery of justice rewarded to Johannes 
Mehserle for murdering Oscar Grant and the open 
collaboration of several non-profit organizations 
with the government to contain and delegitimatize 
the people?s resistance is a clarion call. It?s a 
call not just for justice for Oscar Grant and the 
countless victims of police terror, but for 
radical, systemic change. The anger, and its 
focus, indicates a heightened awareness on behalf 
of a new generation of working class Black, 
Latino and Asian youth of the intractable 
contradictions between the imperialist state and 
oppressed peoples and the willingness to challenge them.

A new phase of development and a new set of 
challenges now confront the movement to win 
justice for Oscar Grant. The inexperience of the 
youth forces engaged and the current weaknesses 
and fragmentation of the left make this a very, 
very delicate time. If certain conversations 
aren?t had, if certain lessons of the past and 
present aren?t incorporated, and if certain 
contradictions aren?t addressed, then all of the 
radiant energy on display July 8th could easily 
fade, or just as easily turn its wrath in upon 
itself and miss its true target.

This small contribution is an attempt to help 
ignite conversation, share reflections from 
critical movements of the past, and offer 
suggestions in the hope of helping to facilitate 
strategic and programmatic development within the movement.

On Next Steps and Organizing Orientation
1. Joint Reflection: to move the Justice for 
Oscar Grant Movement forward progressive forces 
focused on building the democratic mass movement, 
should join forces and come together to assess 
the strengths and weaknesses of the Justice for 
Oscar Grant Movement over the past year and half. 
One of the two main objectives of such a 
collaboration, in the short term, would be to 
produce a joint assessment and a unified set of 
demands, both tactical and strategic, to help 
anchor the movement in its next phase of struggle.
2. Joint Assessment: This assessment should be 
issued as a statement and/or document that 
provides a clear analysis of the movements 
weaknesses and errors and some strong points of 
orientation to try and anchor, sustain, and guide 
it going forward. Some key points of assessment 
should include (but not be limited to) the following:
a) A firm condemnation of collaboration and 
opportunism; but avoiding personalized 
vilification of the social forces that 
collaborated (being mindful of the lessons of COINTELPRO)
b) A statement of distinction on the role of 
political and community organizations as opposed 
to non-profits; and clarity on the reformist 
orientation and political limitations of non-profit organizations
c) The function of organization in the movement 
to combat infiltration (as appears to have 
occurred within the Black Bloc and other formations)
d) The need for strategy to help facilitate 
forward development and political advancement of the movement(s)
3. Joint Strategy and Work Plan: The second 
primary objective of such a collaboration would 
be to draft a one-year strategy and work plan to 
realize the unified demands that are put forward 
to the movement to democratically accept 
(understanding the independence of initiative of 
each formation), modify, or categorically reject.

This convergence of forces, although necessarily 
centered in California, particularly the Bay Area 
and Los Angeles, should seek to build and 
consolidate a national and international organizing initiative.

On Demand Expansion and Development
1. The opening of a Federal Investigation by the 
Department of Justice (DOJ) can and should be 
used as a national organizing opportunity. 
However, more self-determining justice 
initiatives should be organized simultaneously to 
challenge US hegemony (internally and externally) 
by internationalizing the struggle. More 
concretely, an independent ?people?s or citizens? 
commission should be established to conduct an 
autonomous examination of the evidence, issue 
indictments, and pressure the DOJ and its 
process. This commission would ideally consist of 
family members, community activists, lawyers, 
jurists, etc. and call on various international 
bodies within the United Nations (UN) and 
International System (such as the Inter-American 
Court) to intervene in the case and challenge the 
racist policies and practices that enabled it.
2. The demand for resources and economic 
development must be supported unequivocally, but 
modified in a manner that puts limits on the 
controls of City Hall and its near exclusive 
access by ?grasstop? forces. A means to 
accomplishing this (not without its faults or 
limits by any stretch) could be the 
institutionalization of participatory budgeting 
systems to determine the use of the cities 
resources to ensure they are used to address and 
service human needs such as adequate housing, health care, education, etc.

Synthesis Demands
This synthesis is an attempt to combine and 
expand on the demands originally articulated by 
the African People?s Socialist Party (APSP), By 
Any Means Necessary (BAMN) Coalition, and the New Years Movement (NYM).
1. We demand that Officers Pirone and Domenici be indicted for murder.
2. We demand civil restitution and reparations 
for the family Oscar Grant, and the victims of 
Police violence by the OPD and BART.
3. We demand that BART Police be disarmed and disbanded.
4. We demand that the Police Bill of Rights, 
which shields the records of police misconduct, 
abuse and murder, be immediately abolished, and 
that all police records be made public.
5. We demand that an independent ?peoples 
commission?, drawn and determined by the citizens 
of Oakland, with international jurists determined 
by this commission, be granted oversight into the 
Federal Department of Justice investigation of 
the murder of Oscar Grant, and systemic 
violations of civil and human rights by the Oakland and Transit Police.
6. We demand the termination of all Gang 
Injunction laws and policies in Oakland and 
throughout California on the grounds of their 
unconstitutionality and their violation of civil and international law.
7. We demand that Oakland be declared a sanctuary 
city, and that all ICE raids and racial profiling 
policies and practices targeting Latino/a, Black, 
Asian and other oppressed peoples be terminated immediately.
8. We demand that the City of Oakland, the State 
of California, and the Federal Government provide 
massive funding for education and jobs in Oakland 
that are allocated and distributed via a 
transparent and democratic public participatory budgeting process.

One-Year Plan Targets/Tactics
1. Conduct a mass and coordinated non-compliance 
action in Oakland and Los Angeles the day after 
Mehserle?s sentencing, that calls for Student 
walk outs and strike or ?sick out? actions by 
Public Sector, Transit, Dock, and other workers 
that disrupts the regular flow of ?business? to 
raise our demands and demonstrate the power of mass action.
2. Organize broad, neighborhood Police/Copwatch 
formations, and work to create ?liberated zones? 
in Black, Latino, Asian, and white working class 
and poor communities, where the police are 
prohibited or curtailed in their activities.
3. Organize a massive local, regional, statewide, 
and national ?Justice for Oscar Grant? petition 
drive to pressure the DOJ and build support for 
the movement?s demands (buttressed by broad 
internet and social networking interface to support and broaden reach).
4. Develop a broad people?s media and cultural 
workers initiative to provide educational, 
motivational, and agitation tools and resources 
for the movement and to provide sufficient 
analysis and coverage to frame the movement from 
its own perspective and counter the reactionary 
framing and attacks of the bourgeois media.
5. Hold a People?s Tribunal, with international 
observers and jurists, to pressure the DOJ and its deliberations.
6. Utilize Inter-American and United Nations 
special action procedures and special rapporteurs 
to conduct international investigations, 
recommendations, and sanctions on the US 
government for its failure to protect the human 
rights of Oscar Grant, the victims of police 
violence, and the targets of the various racial 
profiling laws and policies sanctioned by the government.
7. Organize local, state and national referendum 
and legislative initiatives to realize and 
support the movement?s demands. A possible start 
could entail running progressive candidates in 
Oakland who stand on a platform based on the 
movement?s demands in the upcoming elections to 
help define public debate and pressure the government to comply.

Without a doubt, accomplishing all of this is a 
tall order, particularly for a young and 
fragmented movement. But, as the history of the 
peoples? struggles against white supremacy, 
colonialism, and imperialism here and all over 
the world demonstrate, no political challenges 
are insurmountable. If we dare to win, then we 
must dare to struggle against the internal 
shortcomings and subjectivities of the movement 
that hinder us from building the operational 
unity needed to execute initiatives of scale such 
as those proposed in this paper. The struggle for 
unity does not mean that we should stop 
struggling against collaborationist and 
opportunist ideas and practices. It simply 
implores us to do all we can to seize the 
opportunities at hand. With organization, 
strategy, discipline, and determination we can and will win!

In Unity and Struggle.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Kali can be contacted via kaliakuno at gmail.com.





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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 16 12:16:48 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:16:48 -0700
Subject: [News] US buying the Press in Venezuela
Message-ID: <mailman.132.1279297026.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Buying the Press - Venezuela

http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/07/documents-reveal-multimillion-dollar.html

By Eva Golinger
Documents reveal multimillion-dollar funding to 
journalists and media in Venezuela

US State Department documents declassified under 
the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) evidence 
more than $4 million USD in funding to 
journalists and private media in Venezuela during 
the last three years. This funding is part of the 
more than $40 million USD international agencies 
are investing annually in anti-Chavez groups in 
Venezuela in an attempt to provoke regime change

The funding has been channeled directly by the 
State Department through three US agencies: 
Panamerican Development Foundation (PADF), 
Freedom House, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

In a blatant attempt to hide their activities, 
the State Department has censored the names of 
organizations and journalists receiving these 
multimillion-dollar funds. However, one document 
dated July 2008 mistakenly left unveiled the 
names of the principal Venezuelan groups 
receiving the funds: Espacio Publico (Public 
Space) and Instituto de Prensa y Sociedad 
(Institute for Press and Society ?IPYS?).

Espacio Publico and IPYS are the entities charged 
with coordinating the distribution of the 
millions in State Department funds to private 
media outlets and Venezuelan journalists working to promote US agenda.

The documents evidence that PADF has implemented 
programs in Venezuela dedicated to ?enhancing 
media freedom and democratic institutions? and 
training workshops for journalists in the 
development and use of ?innovative media 
technologies?, due to the alleged ?threats to 
freedom of expression? and ?the climate of 
intimidation and self-censorship among journalists and the media?.

According to the documents, PADF?s objective is 
to ?strengthen independent journalists by 
providing them with training, technical 
assistance, materials and greater access to 
innovative internet-based technologies that 
expand and diversify media coverage and increase 
their capacity to inform the public on a timely 
basis about the most critical policy issues impacting Venezuela?.

However, while on paper this may appear benign, 
in reality, Venezuela?s corporate media outlets 
and journalists, together with US agencies, 
actively manipulate and distort information in 
order to portray the Venezuelan government as a 
?communist dictatorship? that ?violates basic human rights and freedoms?.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only do media and journalists in Venezuela 
have a near-absolute freedom of expression, 
during the past decade, under the Chavez 
administration, hundreds of new media outlets, 
many community-based, have been created in order 
to foster and expand citizens? access to media. 
Community media was prohibited under prior 
governments, which only gave broadcasting access 
to corporations willing to pay big money to 
maintain information monopolies in the country.

Today, corporate media outlets and their 
journalists use communications power to publicly 
promote the overthrow of the Venezuelan 
government. The owners and executives of these 
media corporations form part of the Venezuelan 
elite that, under the reigns of Washington, ran 
the country for forty years before Chavez won the presidency in 1998.

What these documents demonstrate is that 
Washington not only is funding Venezuelan media, 
in clear violation of laws that prohibit this 
type of ?propaganda? and ?foreign interference?, 
but also is influencing the way Venezuelan 
journalists perceive their profession and their political reality.

The State Department funding not only is used to 
create and aid media outlets that promote 
anti-Chavez propaganda, but also to capture 
Venezuelan journalists at the core - as students 
? in order to shape their vision of journalism 
and ensure their loyalty early on to US agenda.

FUNDING FOR ANTI-CHAVEZ WEB PAGES

One of the PADF programs, which received $699,996 
USD from the State Department in 2007, ?supported 
the development of independent media in 
Venezuela? and ?journalism via innovative media 
technologies?. The documents evidence that more 
than 150 Venezuelan journalists were trained by 
US agencies and at least 25 web pages were created with US funding.

During the past two years, there has been a 
proliferation of web pages, blogs, and Twitter, 
MySpace and Facebook users in Venezuela, the 
majority of whom use these media outlets to 
promote anti-Chavez messages and disseminate 
distorted and false information about the 
country?s political and economic reality.

Other programs run by the State Department have 
selected Venezuelan students and youth to receive 
training in the use of these new media 
technologies in order to create what they call a 
?network of cyber-dissidents? against the Venezuelan government.

For example, in April 2010, the George W. Bush 
Institute, together with Freedom House and the 
State Department, organized an encounter of 
?activists for freedom and human rights? and 
?experts in Internet? to analyze the ?global 
movement of cyber-dissidents?. Rodrigo Diamanti, 
anti-Chavez youth activist, was present at the 
event, which took place in Dallas, Texas and was 
presided over by George W. Bush himself, along 
with ?dissidents? invited from Iran, Syria, Cuba, Russia and China.

In October last year, Mexico City hosted the II 
Summit of the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), 
an organization created by the State Department 
to bring together select youth activists from 
countries of strategic importance to the US, 
along with the founders of new media technologies 
and representatives from different US agencies. 
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presided over 
the event, and anti-Chavez youth activists Yon 
Goicochea (Primero Justicia), Rafael Delgado, and 
Geraldine Alvarez, attended as special guests. 
All three are members of Futuro Presente, an 
organization created in Venezuela in 2008 with 
funding from the Cato Institute in Washington.

FUNDING TO UNIVERSITIES

The declassified State Department documents also 
reveal more than $716,346 USD in funding via 
Freedom House in 2008, for an 18-month project 
seeking to ?strengthen independent media in 
Venezuela?. This project also funded the creation 
of a ?resource center for journalists? in an 
unnamed Venezuelan university. ?The center will 
develop a community radio, website and training 
workshops?, all funded by the State Department.

Another $706,998 USD was channeled through PADF 
to ?promote freedom of expression in Venezuela? 
through a two-year project focusing on ?new media 
technologies and investigative journalism?. 
?Specifically, PADF and its local partner will 
provide training and follow-up support in 
innovative media technologies and formats in 
several regions throughout Venezuela
This 
training will be compiled and developed into a university-level curriculum?.

Another document evidences three Venezuelan 
universities, Universidad Central de Venezuela 
(Central University of Venezuela ?UCV?), 
Universidad Metropolitana (Metropolitan 
University) and Universidad Santa Maria (St. 
Mary?s University), which incorporated courses on 
media studies into their curriculums, designed 
and funded by the State Department. These three 
universities have been the principal launching 
pad for the anti-Chavez student movements during the past three years.

PADF also received $545,804 USD for a program 
titled ?Venezuela: The Voices of the Future?. 
This project, which allegedly lasted one year, 
was devoted to ?developing a new generation of 
independent journalists through a focus on new 
media technologies?. PADF also funded various 
blogs, newspapers, radio stations and television 
stations in regions throughout Venezuela, to 
ensure the ?publication? of reports and articles 
by the ?participants? in the program.

USAID and PADF

More funds have been distributed to anti-Chavez 
political groups in Venezuela through USAID?s 
Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI) in 
Caracas, which has an annual budget between $5-7 
million USD. These millions form part of the more 
than $40 million USD given annually to opposition 
organizations in Venezuela by US, European and 
Canadian agencies, as evidenced in the May 2010 
report, ?Venezuela: Assessing Democracy 
Assistance? published by the National Edowment 
for Democracy?s World Movement for Democracy 
(WMD) and Spain?s FRIDE Institute.

PADF has been active in Venezuela since 2005 as 
one of USAID?s principal contractors. PADF was 
created by the State Department in 1962 and is 
?affiliated? with the Organization of American 
States (OAS). In Venezuela, PADF has been working 
to ?strengthen local civil society groups?, and 
is ?one of few major international groups that 
have been able to provide significant cash grants 
and technical assistance to Venezuelan NGOs?.

Posted by Eva Golinger at 
<http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/07/documents-reveal-multimillion-dollar.html>12:53 
AM




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 16 20:06:59 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:06:59 -0700
Subject: [News] Effort to Shut Down Gulf Well is Failing
Message-ID: <mailman.170.1279325268.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Published on This Can't Be Happening 
(<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net>http://www.thiscantbehappening.net)


----------


Breaking News: Effort to Shut Down Gulf Well is Failing

Created 07/16/2010 - 17:48
Dave Lindorff

The Coast Guard is conceding this afternoon that the pressure is not 
building up as hoped in the blown-out BP Deepwater Horizon well in 
the Gulf of Mexico, raising concerns that the pipe that runs from the 
surface down through the bore to the oil reservoir 13,000 feet below 
the sea bottom has lost its integrity, and is allowing oil under high 
pressure to leak out into the surrounding concrete and rock outside 
the pipe, where it can and likely will make its way to the waters above.

There is visual evidence that this is happening. While it has not 
been mentioned in news reports, one view taken of the sea floor taken 
by a 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/html/Hos_ROV1.html%E2%80%9D>videocam 
[1] on the Hos ROV 1, one of the remote robot submersibles monitoring 
the wellhead, and on display on the BP website, beginning at about 
2:48:40 Central Time showed clouds of muddy looking water suddenly 
spring up and begin obscuring the view of the sea floor. Some of the 
billowing material was light colored, and could be mud pushed up by 
leaking methane gas. Some looked decidedly dark brown, like the oil 
that has been seen coming from the top of the blowout preventer (BOP).

A second rover, the Viking Poseidon ROV 1, which was not included in 
the live cams displayed from BP's public access site, but which can 
be seen live 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/html/Viking_Poseidon_ROV1.html%E2%80%9D>here 
[2], also showed a large cloud of churning brown material billowing 
up from the sea floor beginning at 3:06:00 Central Time.

If either of these video images are in fact oil coming out of the 
ground around the wellhead, it would mean that the liner has been 
seriously breached somewhere below ground, and that there is no way 
to either stop the oil flow, or even collect it all from above the 
wellhead. That would certainly explain why the pressure at the 
stoppered wellhead has leveled off at about 6700 psi. That's well 
below the "80000-900 psi" that until today was what the government 
and BP said would be full pressure, and is even below the new, 
improved target mentioned by retired Adm. Thad Allen, who now says a 
more modest 7500 psi would be okay.

The only hope of stopping this catastrophe would be the relief wells 
that have been drilled to within a few feet of the casing, several 
miles down below the surface of the earth.

The failure of the effort to cap the well above the BOP, as I 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/139>wrote earlier [3], was 
pretty well foreordained when the same Viking Poseidon ROV 1, a month 
ago, showed a 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2RxIQP0IBU%E2%80%9D>video 
of oil blasting out of cracks in the sea floor [4] around the BOP, 
already proving that the casing had been breached.

It is possible that the pressure in the pipe was greater at that 
point, back on June 13, because the well opening, at the top of the 
BOP, was still crimped and holding back the gusher. Once that opening 
was cleared in preparation for installing the current cap, the oil 
was able to flow out more freely, which would have reduced the 
pressure on whatever leaks exist in the casing below ground.

But now, for reasons that still elude me, the government has allowed 
BP to try to shut down the well at the top, allowing the pressure in 
the whole casing to rise precipitously, and it appears the inevitable 
has happened: the oil and gas is pushing out the breaches in the 
casing, and is likely expanding the openings, too, making the breach 
worse than before.

The top of this blown out well should be opened up wide as soon as 
possible, and BP and the government should focus all efforts on those 
relief wells, and on trying to get this runaway well sealed at the 
bottom as soon as possible.

Trying to shut things off at the top was a fool's errand, and can 
only have been driven by a BP and White House PR effort to show that 
something is being done. However, some things shouldn't be done, and 
this is one of those things. The idea that the government and BP knew 
that shutting down the top of the well could lead to disaster, and 
that they went ahead and did it, knowing that it would only provide 
temporary relief at best anyhow, is insanity.

By the way, yesterday, I contacted both the BP and the government-run 
Unified Command press offices asking for an explanation as to how 
they could shut down the top of the well, when BP's own cameras in 
June showed oil blowing out of cracks in the sea floor near the 
wellhead. Both offices promised to respond. To date, neither has.

----------
Source URL: 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/140>http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/140

Links:
[1] 
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/html/Hos_ROV1.html"
[2] 
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/html/Viking_Poseidon_ROV1.html"
[3] http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/139
[4] http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2RxIQP0IBU"




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 20 11:04:31 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:04:31 -0700
Subject: [News] CIA Told that Iran Has No Nuclear Bomb Programme
Message-ID: <mailman.19.1279638803.5741.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Amiri Told CIA Iran Has No Nuclear Bomb Programme
Analysis by Gareth Porter

http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=3201
WASHINGTON, 19 Jul (IPS) - Contrary to a news media narrative that 
Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri has provided intelligence on covert 
Iranian nuclear weapons work, CIA sources familiar with the Amiri 
case say he told his CIA handlers that there is no such Iranian 
nuclear weapons programme, according to a former CIA officer.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official, told IPS that 
his sources are CIA officials with direct knowledge of the entire 
Amiri operation.

The CIA contacts say that Amiri had been reporting to the CIA for 
some time before being brought to the U.S. during Hajj last year, 
Giraldi told IPS, initially using satellite-based communication. But 
the contacts also say Amiri was a radiation safety specialist who was 
"absolutely peripheral" to Iran's nuclear programme, according to Giraldi.

Amiri provided "almost no information" about Iran's nuclear 
programme, said Giraldi, but had picked up "scuttlebutt" from other 
nuclear scientists with whom he was acquainted that the Iranians have 
no active nuclear weapon programme.

Giraldi said information from Amiri's debriefings was only a minor 
contribution to the intelligence community's reaffirmation in the 
latest assessment of Iran's nuclear programme of the 2007 National 
Intelligence Estimate (NIE)'s finding that work on a nuclear weapon 
has not been resumed after being halted in 2003.

Amiri's confirmation is cited in one or more footnotes to the new 
intelligence assessment of Iran's nuclear programme, called a 
"Memorandum to Holders", according to Giraldi, but it is now being 
reviewed, in light of Amiri's "re- defection" to Iran.

An intelligence source who has read the "Memorandum to Holders" in 
draft form confirmed to IPS that it presents no clear-cut departure 
from the 2007 NIE on the question of weaponisation. The developments 
in the Iranian nuclear programme since the 2007 judgment are 
portrayed as "subtle and complex", said the source.

CIA officials are doing their best to "burn" Amiri by characterising 
him as a valuable long-term intelligence asset, according to Giraldi, 
in part in order to sow as much distrust of him among Iranian 
intelligence officials as possible.

But Giraldi said it is "largely a defence mechanism" to ward off 
criticism of the agency for its handling of the Amiri case.

"The fact is he wasn't well vetted," said Giraldi, adding that Amiri 
was a "walk- in" about whom virtually nothing was known except his job.

Although an investigation has begun within the CIA of the procedures 
used in the case, Giraldi said, Amiri's erstwhile CIA handlers still 
do not believe he was a double agent or "dangle".

What convinced CIA officers of Amiri's sincerity, according to 
Giraldi, was Amiri's admission that he had no direct knowledge of the 
Iranian nuclear programme.

A "dangle" would normally be prepared with some important 
intelligence that the U.S. is known to value.

Amiri's extremely marginal status in relation to the Iranian nuclear 
programme was acknowledged by an unnamed U.S. official who told The 
New York Times and Associated Press Friday that Amiri was indeed a 
"low-level scientist", but that the CIA had hoped to use him to get 
to more highly placed Iranian officials.

Giraldi's revelations about Amiri's reporting debunks a media 
narrative in which Amiri provided some of the key evidence for a 
reversal by the intelligence community of its 2007 conclusion that 
Iran had not resumed work on nuclear weapons.

An Apr. 25 story by Washington Post reporters Joby Warrick and Greg 
Miller said the long-awaited reassessment of the Iranian nuclear 
programme had been delayed in order to incorporate a "new flow of 
intelligence" coming from "informants, including scientists with 
access to Iran's military programs&."

They quote Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair as 
explaining in an interview that the delay was because of "information 
coming in and the pace of developments".

Warrick and Miller reported that Amiri had "provided spy agencies 
with details about sensitive programs including a long-hidden 
uranium-enrichment plant near the city of Qom." Their sources were 
said to be "current and former officials in the United States and Europe".

Warrick and Miller could not get CIA officials to discuss Amiri. 
Instead they quoted the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI) 
as saying that Amiri "has been associated with sensitive nuclear 
programs for at least a decade".

NCRI is the political arm of Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), the 
anti-regime Iranian terrorist organization which has been a conduit 
for Israeli intelligence on the Iranian nuclear programme.

On Jun. 8, David E. Sanger of the New York Times cited "foreign 
diplomats and some American officials" as sources in reporting that a 
series of intelligence briefings for members of the U.N. Security 
Council last spring amounted to "a tacit admission by the United 
States that it is gradually backing away" from the 2007 NIE. Sanger 
referred to "new evidence" that allegedly led analysts to "revise and 
in some cases reverse" that estimate's conclusion that Iran was no 
longer working on a nuclear weapon.

Sanger cited "Western officials" as confirming that Amiri was 
providing some of the new information.

Three days later, the Washington Post ran another story quoting David 
Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International 
Security, as saying that the intelligence briefings for Security 
Council members had included "information about nuclear 
weaponisation" obtained from Amiri.

Albright said he had been briefed on the intelligence earlier that 
week, and the Post reported a "U.S. official" had confirmed Albright's account.

Subsequently, ABC News reported that Amiri's evidence had "helped to 
contradict" the 2007 NIE, and McClatchy Newspapers repeated 
Albright's allegation and the conclusion that the new assessment had 
reversed the intelligence conclusion that Iran had ceased work 
related to weaponisation.

In creating that false narrative, journalists have evidently been 
guided by personal convictions on the issue that are aligned with 
certain U.S., European and Israeli officials who have been pressuring 
the Barack Obama administration to reject the 2007 estimate.

For the Israelis and for some U.S. officials, reversing the 
conclusion that Iran is not actively pursuing weaponisation is 
considered a precondition for manoeuvring U.S. policy into a military 
confrontation with Iran.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist 
specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition 
of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the 
Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 21 12:43:08 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:43:08 -0700
Subject: [News] Israeli military destroys Palestinian village
Message-ID: <mailman.3.1279730673.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Israeli military destroys Palestinian village

author

  Wednesday July 21, 2010 17:22
author
 by Brian Ennis - IMEMC & Agencies 
<http://www.imemc.org/report_posts?subject=Report%20post:%20Story%2059169%20with%20title:%20Israeli%20military%20destroys%20Palestinian%20village&message=Report%20post:%20Story%2059169%20with%20title:%20Israeli%20military%20destroys%20Palestinian%20village%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.imemc.org%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D59169%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content>
Report post

http://www.imemc.org/article/59169

The Israeli military demolished an entire village in the Jordan 
Valley after declaring it within a closed military zone.

The Israeli occupation force destroyed an entire village Monday 
morning in the Jordan valley after most residents had left when the 
Civil Administration cut off the last of their water, according to Haaretz.

55 structures were destroyed by the Israeli military in Farasiya, 
leaving the 120 farmers, laborers and their families without homes.

The Israelis say they posted eviction notices declaring the area a 
live fire zone but received no appeals challenging the declaration.

The residents were mostly shepherds and those that worked the land of 
families in the nearby town of Tubas.

This is the culmination of a number of policies by Israel to choke 
the people of water and ultimately into leaving the land. A few years 
ago the army destroyed a pipe the residents had laid to bring water 
from a nearby stream into their farms and for drinking.

Last year they forbid the residents from connecting to wells made by 
Mekorot Water Company. They have since been pumping saltwater to the 
surface for their livestock and having water brought in by tanker, 
until four months ago when the Civil Administration confiscated the pumps.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 22 16:38:18 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:38:18 -0700
Subject: [News] Venezuela cuts ties with Colombia
Message-ID: <mailman.7.1279831120.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Thursday, July 22, 2010

23:30 Mecca time, 20:30 GMT

Venezuela cuts ties with Colombia

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/07/2010722153742742163.html

Venezuela has broken off diplomatic relations with Colombia after 
Bogota charged that leftist guerrilla leaders it is fighting are in 
Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has said.

"I announce with a tear in the heart: Venezuela breaks off from this 
moment all relations with the government of Colombia," Chavez told 
journalists at the presidential palace on Thursday.

"We have no other choice but, out of dignity, to totally break our 
relations with our brother nation of Colombia," the president said 
live on state television, as he hosted a visit by Argentine soccer 
star Diego Maradona.

Nicolas Maduro,Venezuela's foreign minister, declared immediately 
afterwards that Colombia had 72 hours to withdraw its diplomats in 
Venezuela and close its embassy.

Earlier, Colombia's foreign ministry had said that Maria Luisa 
Chiappe, its ambassador to Caracas, Venezuela's capital, would be 
called back to Bogota "to evaluate the situation".

At an emergency meeting of the Washington-based Organisation of 
American States (OAS), Luis Alfonso Hoyos, a Colombian diplomat, 
presented evidence that he said suggests Venezuela was harbouring 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) rebels.

Killings and kidnappings

Hoyos accused Chavez's government of tolerating the rebels who he 
said carried out killings, kidnappings and drug-trafficking on both 
sides of the long frontier.

"The continent cannot allow this nightmare to spread," Hoyos said.

But Roy Chaderton, Venezuela's ambassador, rejected the Colombian 
presentation as a "lie", saying: "There is no evidence, no proof, 
these are photos taken I don't know where."

Hoyos went on to show a series of photos and videos of alleged Farc 
leaders and guerrillas relaxing, roasting pigs and playing a piano at 
camps he said were well inside Venezuela.

"Given the past history on this issue, the most likely outcome is 
going to be stonewalling, postponement, setting up a committee to 
investigate the matter,"

Larry Burns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington

"Facts over recent weeks show that real risks are materialising due 
to the consolidated, active and growing presence of these terrorist 
groups in Venezuela," Hoyos said.

He added that the Venezuelan authorities "tolerate the presence of 
these groups, they don't carry out actions against them".

Sometimes the rebels are even accompanied by members of Venezuela's 
National Guard, Hoyos added.

Farc rebels carried out cross-border attacks from Venezuela as 
recently as June and July, Hoyos said as he showed photographs of 
civilian and military victims of these attacks.

The ambassador's remarks came a week after Alvaro Uribe, Colombia's 
outgoing president who leaves office in August, said his government 
had evidence that five leaders of leftist guerrilla groups were in Venezuela.

Uribe's office is contending the rebel leaders in Venezuela include 
four senior members of Farc and one from the smaller National 
Liberation Army (ELN).

Both rebel movements have been waging an armed campaign against the 
Colombian government since the mid-1960s.

Larry Burns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in 
Washington, told Al Jazeera that "some people believe [Alvaro] Uribe 
wants to shape the future of Colombia's foreign policy and maintain a 
policy of hositility towards Venezuela".

Uribe accusations

"Uribe is the one who disclosed and made the accusation that 
Venezuelans have taken in Farc guerrillas and have provided them with 
hospitality. The incoming president [Juan Manuel Santos] hasn't made 
those charges," he said.

Burns added that it was "unlikely" that the OAS would take any 
decisive action on the matter.

"There are a number of countries in the OAS who are very favourable 
to Hugo Chavez and that includes Argentina, which is a very important 
country in Latin America," he said.

"Given the past history on this issue, the most likely outcome is 
going to be stonewalling, postponement, setting up a committee to 
investigate the matter, but there's going to be an effort to shun any 
clear confrontation because of the fact that the evidence is 
questionable and the motivation is even more questionable."

Colombia and Venezuela cut diplomatic ties last year after Bogota and 
the US signed a military co-operation agreement that Chavez 
considered a threat to regional security.

Chavez has accused Uribe of trying to thwart a normalisation of 
relations when the Colombian leader leaves office August 7.

Uribe, who has had tense relations with his Venezuelan counterpart, 
will be succeeded by Juan Manuel Santos, his former defence minister, 
who has signalled a less hostile approach to Venezuela.
  Source: Al Jazeera and agencies




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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 23 11:06:45 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 08:06:45 -0700
Subject: [News] The utility of Cuban prisoners
Message-ID: <mailman.31.1279897634.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

The utility of Cuban prisoners

Posted: 22 Jul 2010 07:46 AM PDT
http://machetera.wordpress.com/

For whom are the [Cuban] prisoners useful? - 
<http://la-isla-desconocida.blogspot.com/2010/07/para-quienes-son-utiles-los-presos.html>espa?ol

Enrique Ubieta G?mez

Translation: Machetera

So here?s the problem.  The ex-prisoners arrive 
in Madrid.  The press clings to them for a few 
days.  If they?re lucky, they?ll begin to live 
from their labors and not from subversive 
activity that was quite well paid.  Perhaps some 
will manage a post in cyberspace.  But, as the 
Cubans say, no es f?cil [it's not easy], in the 
midst of an economic crisis.  I have no idea how 
much they?ll be paid for their commentary (the 
offensive or threatening diatribes they launch at 
revolutionary bloggers), but if we don?t publish 
them, they don?t get paid.  Little by little, 
they?ll be forgotten.  They?re no longer any 
use.  In other words, they?re no longer any use 
for their former promoters, for U.S. imperialism.

The math is simple.  A counter-revolutionary in 
the streets of Havana is worth something, just 
not a lot.  They don?t inspire anyone.  Those who 
pay them prefer that they end up in prison or on 
hunger strikes.  Preferably moribund, or 
dead.  How many tales of kidnappings and 
15-minute public beatings without eyewitnesses or 
physical traces has Yoani had to invent for 
herself in order to feed the chronic lack of 
spectacle or heroism suffered by her cyberspace 
?dissidence??  Over what argument will the next 
media campaign be launched?  Fari?as will need to 
take a vacation before launching his, I don?t 
know, 25th or 26th hunger strike.  And he?ll have 
to keep a good excuse at hand.  But the Ladies in 
White have been left with nothing.  Without a 
social goal, in bureaucracy-speak.

In the midst of the extreme triumphal excitement 
surrounding the prisoner release one can begin to 
see the first signs of unease.  The demands of 
the multinational mainstream press and 
politicians in the metropolitan centers were 
dressed in humanitarian garb, but the objective 
was not the liberation of the mercenaries, but ? 
through blackmail ? avoiding their release.  What 
was desired ? what is desired ? is the toppling 
of the Cuban Revolution.  And one mercenary in 
prison is worth more than five in the street and 
ten in Spain.  Now they say nothing has 
happened.  According to EFE, Ra?l Rivero, whose 
poetic pen is compensated by the networks of the 
U.S.-Hispanic rightwing (I?m talking about the 
rightwing Spanish PP [Popular Party] ? not the 
rightwing PSOE [Spanish Socialist Workers Party]) 
insists that the freeing of the prisoners is ?a 
unilateral decision? by the Cuban government that 
has not been influenced by conversations with the 
Spanish government and the Catholic church; it?s 
some kind of trick.  The PP is trying to keep the 
media show going as long as possible for the 
ex-prisoners on Spanish soil, through anti-PSOE skirmishes.

The Cuban Revolution knows how to converse, on 
any subject, equal to equal.  If Obama?s 
government should care to do so, it would find no 
obstacles.  However, the subversive escalation 
has not diminished.  On June 18th, USAID tendered 
$3,650,000 to finance subversive programs and 
networks in Cuba: $500,000 for those it calls 
?political prisoners? and their families; 
$1,500,000 to open spaces for ?freedom of 
expression? (U.S. style, in Cuba); $500,000 to 
create or strengthen religious and spiritual 
groups aligned with Washington; $500,000 to 
promote private unions; etc.  This money comes on 
top of the $15 million dollars recently unfrozen 
for USAID?s Cuba program.  Is receiving money 
from a foreign government with the explicit 
proposal of subverting order within the country 
itself not an execrable and punishable act?  U.S. 
and European laws carry heavy sentences for those 
engaging in this crime.  No-one questions 
them.  Who would call them ?political prisoners? or ?prisoners of conscience??

If the Cuban Revolution does not fall apart, 
nothing has changed.  And the old mercenaries are 
now useless.  They?re just another bunch of 
hungry mouths in Madrid.  New ones will need to 
be found, to substitute.  And of course they?ll 
be found.  And they?ll be arrested and judged, 
just like in any city throughout the 
world.  They?ll be the new media ?heroes,? 
shooting stars in the firmament of imperial 
war.  The Ladies in White, new ones of course, 
and perhaps some of the old ones signing on ?in 
support? for nostalgia?s sake, will march with 
their gladiolas in front of CNN?s or TVE?s 
cameras.  The circus will begin again.  The 
prisoners are useful for the empire, only for the 
empire, but Cuba will not tolerate 
impunity.  Once again, the Cuban Revolution has 
made a gesture of the highest kind of policy, 
that of humanism; but apparently Obama doesn?t 
have the political courage ? the balls ? to free 
the five Cuban political prisoners, those who did 
fight to prevent death on both sides of the sea.

Enrique Ubieta G?mez is a Cuban journalist; 
editor of 
<http://la-isla-desconocida.blogspot.com/>La Isla 
Desconocida blog and managing director of the 
Cuban publication La Calle del Medio.  Machetera 
is a member of <http://www.tlaxcala.es/>Tlaxcala, 
the network of translators for linguistic 
diversity. This translation may be reprinted as 
long as the content remains unaltered, and the 
source, author, and translator are cited.



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522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 23 12:42:31 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:42:31 -0700
Subject: [News] Israel's Fingerprints Surface on The Hariri Assassination
Message-ID: <mailman.34.1279903369.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

http://www.counterpunch.org/

July 23 - 25, 2010


Israel's Fingerprints Surface

The Hariri Assassination

By RANNIE AMIRI

In the Middle East, the link between political 
machinations, espionage and assassination is 
either clear as day, or clear as mud.

As for the yet unsolved case of the February 2005 
murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, 
mud might be giving way to daylight.

A crackdown on Israeli spy rings operating in 
Lebanon has resulted in more than 70 arrests over 
the past 18 months. Included among them are four 
high-ranking Lebanese Army and General Security 
officers?one having spied for the Mossad since 1984.

A significant breakthrough in the ongoing 
investigation occurred in late June and 
culminated in the arrest of Charbel Qazzi, head 
of transmission and broadcasting at Alfa, one of 
Lebanon?s two state-owned mobile service providers.

According to the Lebanese daily As-Safir, Qazzi 
confessed to installing computer programs and 
planting electronic chips in Alfa transmitters. 
These could then be used by Israeli intelligence 
to monitor communications, locate and target 
individuals for assassination, and potentially 
deploy viruses capable of erasing recorded 
information in the contact lines. Qazzi?s 
collaboration with Israel reportedly dates back 14 years.

On July 12, a second arrest at Alfa was made. 
Tarek al-Raba?a, an engineer and partner of 
Qazzi, was apprehended on charges of spying for 
Israel and compromising national security. A few 
days later, a third Alfa employee was similarly detained.

Israel has refused to comment on the arrests. 
Nevertheless, their apparent ability to have 
penetrated Lebanon?s military and 
telecommunication sectors has rattled the country 
and urgently raised security concerns.

What does any of this have to do with the Hariri assassination?

Outside the obvious deleterious ramifications of 
high-ranking Lebanese military officers working 
for Israel, the very legitimacy of the Special 
Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is now in question. 
The STL is the U.N.-sanctioned body tasked with 
prosecuting those responsible for the 
assassination of the late prime minister. On Feb. 
14, 2005, 1,000 kg of explosives detonated near 
Hariri?s passing motorcade, killing him and 21 others.

It is believed the STL will issue indictments in 
the matter as early as September?relying heavily 
on phone recordings and mobile transmissions to do so.

According to the 
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100716/wl_mideast_afp/lebanonisraelspytelecomhezbollah>AFP, 
?A preliminary report by the U.N. investigating 
team said it had collected data from mobile phone 
calls made the day of Hariri's murder as evidence.?

<http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100718/FOREIGN/707179831/1002>The 
National likewise reported, ?The international 
inquiry, which could present indictments or 
findings as soon as September, according to 
unverified media reports, used extensive phone 
records to draw conclusions into a conspiracy to 
kill Hariri, widely blamed on Syria and its Lebanese allies ...?

In a July 16 televised speech, Hezbollah 
Secretary-General Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah 
speculated the STL would use information gleaned 
from Israeli-compromised communications to 
falsely implicate the group in the prime minister?s murder:

?Some are counting in their analysis of the (STL) 
indictment on witnesses, some of whom turned out 
to be fake, and on the telecommunications 
networks which were infiltrated by spies who can change and manipulate data.

?Before the (2006) war, these spies gave 
important information to the Israeli enemy and 
based on this information, Israel bombed 
buildings, homes, factories and institutions. 
Many martyrs died and many others were wounded. 
These spies are partners in the killings, the 
crimes, the threats and the displacement.?

Nasrallah called the STL?s manipulation an 
?Israeli project? meant to ?create an uproar in Lebanon.?

Indeed, in May 2008 Lebanon experienced a taste 
of this. At the height of an 18-month stalemate 
over the formation of a national unity government 
under then Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, his 
cabinet?s decision to unilaterally declare 
Hezbollah?s fixed-line communication system 
illegal pushed the country to the 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/amiri05102008.html>brink of civil war.

Recognizing the value their secure lines of 
communication had in combating the July 2006 
Israeli invasion and suspecting that state-owned 
telecoms might be compromised, Hezbollah resisted 
Siniora?s plans to have its network dismantled. 
Their men swept through West Beirut and put a 
quick end to the government?s plan. Two years 
later, their suspicions appear to have been vindicated.

Opposition MP and Free Patriotic Movement head 
Michel Aoun has already 
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2010-07/17/c_13402375.htm>warned 
Nasrallah that the STL will likely indict 
?uncontrolled? Hezbollah members to be followed 
by ?
 Lebanese-Lebanese and Lebanese-Palestinian 
tension, and by an Israeli war on Lebanon.?

Giving credence to Nasrallah and Aoun?s 
assertions, Commander in Chief of the Israel 
Defense Forces Gabi Ashkenazi, 
<http://www.politicaltheatrics.net/2010/07/%E2%80%9Cmerlin%E2%80%9D-ashkenazi-wishfully-predicts-deterioration-in-lebanon-in-september/>predicted 
?with lots of wishes? that the situation in 
Lebanon would deteriorate in September after the 
STL indicts Hezbollah for Hariri?s assassination.

Ashkenazi?s gleeful, prescient testimony to the 
Knesset?s Foreign Affairs Committee betrays what 
Israel hopes the fallout from the STL?s report 
will be: fomentation of civil strife and discord 
among Lebanon?s sectarian groups, generally 
divided into pro- and anti-Syria factions. 
Ashkenazi anticipates this to happen, of course, 
because he knows Israel?s unfettered access to 
critical phone records will have framed Hezbollah for the crime.

Israel?s agents and operatives in Lebanon and its 
infiltration of a telecom network have been 
exposed. At the very least, the STL must 
recognize that evidence of alleged Hezbollah 
involvement in Hariri?s death (a group that 
historically enjoyed good ties with the late 
premier) is wholly tainted and likely doctored.

The arrest of Qazzi and al-Raba?a in the breakup 
of Israeli spy rings should prompt the STL to 
shift its focus to the only regional player that 
has benefited from Hariri?s murder; one that will 
continue to do so if and when their designs to 
implicate Hezbollah are realized.

It is time to look at Tel Aviv.

Rannie Amiri is an independent Middle East 
commentator. He may be reached at: rbamiri [at] yahoo [dot] com.




Freedom Archives
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San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 23 12:59:43 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:59:43 -0700
Subject: [News] Cuba's Prisoner Release
Message-ID: <mailman.37.1279904402.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

[and some of the obvious omissions are the 
political prisoners being held in u.s. prisons - 
some for over 40 years - victims of Cointelpro, 
others being given 20-year sentences more 
recently for property damage - or like the Cuban 
Five, getting enormous sentences for exposing 
u.s. sponsored attacks against Cuba]

July 23 - 25, 2010


Surprise! Mainstream Media Omits Context and Key Facts

Cuba's Prisoner Release

By SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES

On July 8, the Washington Post lead story ["Cuba 
to release 52 political prisoners, Catholic 
Church says"] reported Cuba had released five 
political prisoners with assurances of 
forty-seven more to come in the near future. 
Cuban President Raul Castro said all political 
prisoners would soon be released. On July 16, another group was freed.

The Post story and its July 9 editorial "Cuba's 
marginal gesture" omitted facts readers would 
need in order to understand the significance of 
the prisoner release. Both pieces convey the 
image of a "political prisoner" who is dedicated 
to expressing unwelcome views - perhaps a poet, 
or a whistle blower who has uncovered corruption. 
But these prisoners were in jail for committing 
crimes that would have placed them behind bars if 
they were done in the United States including 
working for a foreign government without registering, and committing violence.

For example, Orlando Zapata the hunger striker 
who died in March was convicted of aggravated, 
assault -- cutting off a man's ear with a machete 
because the man had intervened to stop a street 
brawl. He developed his reputation as a 
"dissident" while serving his sentence in prison.

When James Cason arrived in Cuba in 2003 to head 
the US diplomatic mission the State Department 
reportedly instructed him to adopt the "ugly 
American" role, to interfere blatantly in Cuba's 
domestic affairs. Roger Noriega, then Assistant 
Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere 
Affairs, recently explained on a Miami radio talk 
show that the motive was to induce Cuba to expel 
him, thus providing the Bush Administration with 
a pretext to end formal contacts with the island. 
To achieve that goal, Cason openly organized and 
paid Cuban "dissidents." Rather than expel the 
puppeteer, however, Cuba arrested the puppets 
Cason had used as human instruments for his 
machinations. (July 1, Que Pasa, Miami, referring 
to May 20 interview on WQBA Miami [Univision], "Lo que otros no dicen")

The editorial also missed the fact that the 
United States holds more political prisoners in 
Cuba (Guantanamo Base) [and in US prisons] than 
the Cuban government does . Of the 181 remaining 
Guantanamo detainees, an Obama Task Force 
recommended 48 should be released since they have 
been cleared of criminal acts. Most of these 
people were kidnapped. No warrants were issued 
for their arrests (July 9, Financial Times).

The US government justified such ?arrests? post 
9/11 because Americans felt under attack from 
terrorists. We should thus be able to empathize 
with Cubans who at least issued arrest warrants 
for people who secretly received money from 
Cuba's avowed enemy. Declassified CIA documents 
attest to thousands of CIA-backed-terrorist raids 
against Cuba since the early 1960s. More Cubans 
died in these attacks than perished in the 9/11 
horrors. Cuba also suffered substantial property 
damage from CIA backed sabotage of factories and fields.

As for civil liberties, Cuba at least held formal 
trials for the dissidents and found them guilty 
of organizing at the behest of US officials as 
well as discussing future actions and accepting 
money, goods or services from US diplomats.  They 
were not charged for having opposing ideas -- 
although the expression of opposition ideas may 
have motivated the arrests. The Post editorial, 
like a similar sermon in the Los Angeles Times 
(July 10), seems to have made its judgment by using a double standard.

The US media has also portrayed Ghandi-like 
attributes of Guillermo Fari?as, the other faster 
of conscience, which might have been tempered by 
the fact of his 1995 arrest for beating the 
female director of a hospital. In 2002, he 
attacked another woman who then needed surgery.

Zapata and Fari?as may qualify as legitimate 
political oppositionists, but would the editorial 
have talked of George Jackson and other former 
Black Panthers without mentioning their criminal records?

Nowhere do the double standards applied to Cuba 
shine more dramatically than in the issue of 
terrorism. Currently, the United States harbors 
individuals accused of horrific terrorist acts - 
sabotage of a Cuban commercial airliner killing 
73 and a spate of bombings of Cuban tourist spots 
killing an Italian and wounding many. Instead of 
indicting or extraditing Luis Posada Carriles and 
Orlando Bosch for international terrorism -- CIA 
and FBI cables point to their role in sabotaging 
the airliner over Barbados in 1976 killing all 
aboard ? Washington has protected them. The 
Justice Department has charged Posada with 
immigration fraud, a minor charge, and has 
allowed the case to drag on for six years.

Double standards and irony abound. Spain and the 
United States lecture Cuba on freedom after 
holding the island as a formal and informal 
economic colony respectively for 450 years. 
Somehow, both seem to claim they have a perennial 
right to dictate Cuban government behavior.

Saul Landau, a fellow of the Institute for Policy 
Studies is author of 
<http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html>A 
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD, published by CounterPunch.

Nelson P Valdes, Professor Emeritus, Sociology Department, University of
New Mexico.




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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 23 18:48:23 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:48:23 -0700
Subject: [News] Women prepared to break the siege of Gaza
Message-ID: <mailman.55.1279925324.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Women prepared to break the siege of Gaza

Mona Alami, The Electronic Intifada, 23 July 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11417.shtml

BEIRUT (IPS) - The Maryam, an all-female Lebanese aid ship, currently 
docked in the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli, is getting ready to 
set sail for Gaza in the next few days. The ship, which aims to break 
Israel's siege on the Palestinian territory, will carry about fifty 
aid workers, including some US nuns keen to deliver aid to the 
long-suffering women and children of Gaza.

"We were all drawn to the project ... united by a feeling of stark 
injustice," says Samar Hajj, one of the organizers of the Maryam, 
which is named after the mother of Christ.

Israel's siege began in 2006 after Hamas won Palestinian legislative 
elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Its watertight blockade 
has been maintained with Egypt's help, since Hamas sought control of 
the territory in 2007. It has resulted in crippling shortages, making 
daily life difficult in Gaza.

On 31 May, Israeli forces attacked Mavi Marmara, a Turkish 
humanitarian aid vessel bringing aid to Gaza, killing nine Turkish 
activists -- one a US citizen -- on board. After the attack, which 
sparked a wave of global condemnation of Israel, Hajj gathered to 
protest against Israel in downtown Beirut with 11 other friends. "We 
were appalled at the violent images we saw on TV and wanted to take action."

The women later got in touch with Yasser Kashlak, a 36-year-old 
Syrian of Palestinian origin, who heads the Free Palestine Movement. 
Kashlak had contributed to the financing of other vessels that tried 
breaking the siege, including the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the Naji al Ali.

"After the Mavi Marmara incident, one of the women hailed Mary during 
our weekly meeting. Her exclamation came like a revelation, so we 
decided to call our ship Maryam [Mary in Arabic]. The name was 
perfect for a vessel that comprised only women. Who could disparage 
the Virgin Mary, a recognized saint in most religions?" says Hajj.

The ship is slated to make a stopover in a friendly port before 
heading to Gaza because of the palpable hostility between Lebanon and 
Israel. Last month, the Cypriot government banned any vessel headed 
to Gaza from its docks. But activists can still sail from a port in 
Turkish Cyprus.

"We have the option to sail from a number of friendly ports and are 
completely aware of our obligation to transit through a foreign port 
to avoid our trip being labeled an act of war," says Hajj.

Hajj estimates that she has received about 500 applications for the 
trip, but the Maryam will transport only about fifty women, half of 
who are Lebanese nationals, the rest being Arabs, Europeans and from 
the US. The organizer explains that carrying Palestinians on the ship 
is not an option because of the risk of arrests by Israelis.

"The ship will transport cancer medicine and other necessary items 
for women and children. We will not carry any weapons or terrorists, 
irrespective of what the Israeli army might say," says Hajj.

While they wait to set sail, the headquarters of the Maryam remains 
agog with activity as women from different backgrounds, political 
affiliations, nationalities and religious beliefs converse, argue and joke.

"All women traveling on the ship have taken on the name 'Maryam' and 
are distinguishable by a number, like 'Maryam 1,' 'Maryam 2,' etc. We 
prefer to keep identities secret to avoid pressure from respective 
embassies," adds Hajj.

"Maryam 1" is a middle aged Indian lawyer and the wife of an admiral. 
"I am a follower of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi who fought 
against every form of oppression peacefully in the course of his 
life. He was also opposed to the occupation of Palestine," she says.

The lawyer explains that before deciding to join the Maryam, she 
studied the legal implications of the attack on the Freedom Flotilla, 
which she says was illegitimate.

"What the Mavi Marmara attack highlighted was that two sets of rules 
were applied to humanity, depending on a people's color, race and 
religion. But what people fail to realize is that suffering is by 
nature indivisible."

Sitting across from her was "Maryam 2," a former biologist of 
Lebanese-Armenian descent. "I have been closely following the 
Palestinian issue and have been moved by the blatant injustice that 
is practiced against Palestinians by the Israelis," she says.

At the daily meetings, "Maryam 2" bonded with other women from 
diverse backgrounds, particularly a Turkish journalist. Turkey and 
Armenia have been at odds since the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 
the early 20th century.

"The journalist, who barely speaks English, told me I was a godsend 
when she discovered I could speak some Turkish. Here at the Maryam 
headquarters, nationality and religion dissolve behind the common 
resolve of breaking the siege of Gaza," she says.

The sail date for both aid ships from Beirut has yet to be announced. 
Lebanese Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi said the Naji al-Ali is now 
docked at the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli and can set sail once 
it is cleared by port authorities. However, the pan-Arab daily 
al-Hayat reported recently that the sail of the two ships has been 
postponed until further notice, particularly after Iran canceled 
sending two aid ships to the area. The report was denied by Saer 
Ghandour, the organizer of the Naji al-Ali sailing, who added that 
the ship's formalities were still in process.

Meanwhile, most Maryam passengers are impatient to set sail. "We will 
not fight Israelis with weapons, stones or knives, but with our free 
will," says "Maryam 3," a single woman working in the Lebanese 
government. "And we will not surrender."

In Israel, the army chief, Gabi Ashkenazi, told the Knesset's Foreign 
Affairs and Defense Committee on 6 July that every effort should be 
made to ensure that no more flotillas set sail for Gaza.

"Now a Lebanese flotilla with women and parliament members is getting 
organized. Israel is trying to prevent its departure in open and covert ways."



Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Sat Jul 24 11:37:00 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:37:00 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Palestine_-_Interview_with_=93Atallah_Hanna?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?=94?=
Message-ID: <mailman.60.1279985844.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 06:08 PM PDT
http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2010/07/exclusive-intifada-interview-with-archbishop-theodosios-atallah-hanna/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+intifada-palestine%2FyTiY+%28Intifada+Palestine%29

Intifada Exclusive Interview with his Eminence

Archbishop Theodosios "Atallah Hanna"

Archbishop of Sebastia

Greek Orthodox Patriarchate Of Jerusalem

"For those who use the Bible to support Israel need to differentiate 
between God promise and Balfour promise, because the occupation is 
the result of a promise given to the Israelis by Lord Balfour and not 
by God." Archbishop Theodosios


Elias Harb: Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel has 
claimed in varies publications  that Jews, Christians and Muslims are 
able to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem and that only under 
Israeli sovereignty had freedom of worship for all religions been 
assured in the city. How do you respond to that?

Archbishop Theodosios: The facts on the ground say exactly the 
opposite, more and more Muslims and Christians are having great 
difficulties in entering the city. We see thousands are denied the 
entry to their holiest sites. The Israelis authorities are even 
preventing the Arab Jerusalemites from entering the Holy sepulcher 
and the Aqsa mosque on major religious feasts.  It is very apparent 
that the Israelis want Jerusalem to themselves and they do not want 
to share it with others. It is a pity that the city of peace, which 
must symbolize brotherhood and love to be transformed into symbol of 
hatred and division because of Israeli actions.

EH: How has the Israeli Occupation affected Palestinians living in 
the West Bank right to worship and visit the Holy Places in 
Jerusalem? What is the importance of Jerusalem to the Palestinians? 
Could be there a state for the Palestinians without Jerusalem as its 
capital? How Israel developments projects changed the features of the 
holy land?

AT: Let me be clear on this subject, there will be no Palestine 
without Jerusalem as its capital. It is ridicules to imagine 
Palestine without Jerusalem, because it beats in the heart of every 
Palestinian. In addition to that, Israel tries to change the features 
of Jerusalem through its development projects like the light train, 
the malls or the parks. They are trying to make Palestinians 
foreigners in their own city. According to international law, 
Jerusalem is still an occupied city, thus it has no right to change 
anything in it. Whatever is the final agreement between the Israelis 
and the Palestinians, the Palestinians should have the free right of 
entry to their city without any restrictions; also they must have the 
right to live in it, build their homes and resides in Jerusalem 
without the interference of anybody. The Palestinian in Jerusalem is 
in his city and his country and not a stranger and the treatment of 
the Palestinian as a outsider is by itself a racist action.

EH: Many people around the around are unaware of the dwindling 
Christian population in the Holy land. How critical is this situation 
and what will happen to the future of Christianity in the Holy Land?

AT: First of all, I should stress on the fact that the Palestinian 
Christians  were here since Jesus times, where in the Books of Acts 
in the Bible it was mentioned that there were Arabs listening to the 
Apostles in Jerusalem. Christians Arabs had and still have a big 
effect in the development of the Arab societies in the Middle east. 
We are not visitors or strangers to Palestine. Our history is deeply 
rooted in this area of the world. On the other hand, our numbers is 
dwindling due to the occupation and the bitter reality it is causing. 
But we are not afraid that Christians will disappear from Palestine, 
because there will be always Christians  in Palestine to continue the 
message of Jesus Christ.

EH: Many Evangelical Christians in U.S. and western countries believe 
that the emergence of the state of Israel is promised by God. They 
support Israel financially. What is the Orthodox Church position on 
this matter?

AT: The Orthodox church as all churches in the Holy land refuses to 
give excuses from the Bible for the unjust treatment of the Palestinian people.

I am very sorry to hear about some religious groups in the United 
States that support the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian 
territories. Such support cannot be justified from a Christian point 
of view because Christianity is against any sort of occupation and 
the injustice in it all forms and rationalization.

These groups need to re-read their Bible, because the Bible calls 
call us to stand with the marginalized and the oppressed and not with 
the oppressors.

For those who use the Bible to support Israel need to differentiate 
between God promise and Balfour promise, because the occupation is 
the result of a promise given to the Israelis by Lord Balfour and not by God.

God is innocent from the unjust actions of the Israeli occupation of 
our land since 1948 and until now.

EH: Israel has built the separation wall and claims it is for 
security purposes, how do you respond to that?  Also how has the 
Separation Wall affected the daily lives of 
Palestinians?       Israel has created many facts on the ground in 
the occupied territories; do you believe a two state solution to the 
Palestine/Israeli conflict is still possible?

AT: First of all, I want to stress on the fact that wall is illegal, 
even the highest court system in the world declared that it is 
illegal, thus our duty as humans have an obligation towards their 
brethren to dismantle this racist wall. The purpose of this wall is 
simply to cut Palestinians from their neighbors, family and land. A 
proof of that is the inhuman checkpoints, where if a person who wants 
to visit his/her relative in Jerusalem, is not allowed to enter, and 
if by some miracle he got a permission, he has to pass this awful 
checkpoints where is treated in a very humiliating way. I do not 
think security reasons have to do anything with it, especially that 
62% of the wall is done. It is just an excuse to take more land 
illegally and separate Palestinians from each other.

EH:  Israeli and the Western press is demanding that Hamas release 
Gilad Shalat, yet hardly anyone mention the thousands of Palestinians 
political prisoners? Can you tell briefly the situation of 
Palestinian political prisoners?

AT: There are about 11000 political prisoners in Israeli jails, 
quarter of the Palestinian people at some point or another were in 
prison since 1967. This is a big number. It is sad, that the 
international media does not bring it up to the light. These are 
people who fought for a just and right cause, and at the same time 
they are treated in the most inhuman ways a person can imagine.  The 
duty of every free person on the world who believes in the human 
rights, and who believes that all humans were born equal to stand beside them.

Not mentioning the biggest prison in the world is the Gaza strip. 
There are a million and a half living in Gaza. We pray and ask every 
free person in the world to work for the release of the people in Gaza.

EH: On May 31, Israeli commandos attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla 
killing 9 humanitarian activists, wounding over 50 .  Can you share 
your thoughts on this recent attack?

AT: It is a very sad incident that we will never forget. The 
brutality of the Israeli forces is expectable. Whenever people try to 
show the dark side of the Israeli occupation and situation in Gaza, 
they try to shut their voices down. Our condolences and thanks for 
the Turkish government and people who stood a very brave stand toward 
our people.

The flotilla which participated in it several people from different 
nationalities and religions conforming that there are still people 
who believes in the values of justice and peace.

EH:  For the past 62 years, Palestinian who were expelled from 
Palestine,  have been living in refugee Camps in Gaza, West Bank, 
Jordan, Lebanon, an Syria waiting for the right to return to their 
homeland. What message of hope, would you give to these refugee's.

AT: I say to all the Palestinian refugees they should still not give 
up their right of return. It is a right that could not be canceled by 
time. It is a human right because every Palestinian refugee should 
return to his/her home.

Do not lose hope because our cause is a just one and the person who 
was wronged in a way or another should not be desperate, but we 
should still claim our rights where we hope that one day and it will 
be soon Enshaala (God Willing) that every Palestinian could return to 
his/her home.

EH: Thank you Sayidna (Your Eminence) .



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 26 10:34:52 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:34:52 -0700
Subject: [News] Support Africa Today and Walter Turner!
Message-ID: <mailman.83.1280154915.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Just to add that Walter is one of the few people to also consistently 
support and air stories about u.s. political prisoners.
claude

A PERSONAL PLEA TO SUPPORT "AFRICA TODAY"

  Yesterday at 9:54pm

Hotep Africans,

I am forwarding you this urgent message below from our Brother Walter 
Turner regarding a proposed program change from the KPFA's acting 
General Manager which would in short end brother Walter's ability to 
host the much needed "Africa Today" program. This could mean the end 
of this program as we know and depend on it as a media source for 
both local, national, and international news on the African Continent 
and the African Diaspora. We must support this Brother by writing the 
KPFA folks below and letting them know that we don't support their 
idea of the time change.

I ask you all both locally and out of the area to please take a small 
bit of your time and let these people know how we feel about losing 
that space and particularly our media scribe Brother Walter's ability 
to host this program. Brother Walter does not get paid for his effort 
of hosting this program so we are not talking about someone's job. 
This is this Brothers service to African People. Let's show a strong 
unity in this small but large segment of our struggle for uplifting our people.

In Struggle,
Naeem Deskins


Africa Today/ KPFA/ Your support is needed

From: Walter Turner Host/ Producer/Africa Today / KPFA

I am contacting you as a supporter and or long time listener of the
Program "Africa Today" on KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California.

AFRICA TODAY has been aired in various formats on KPFA Radio for more 
than 30 years. The initial host of Africa Today was Faraha Hayati and 
I have now hosted the program for more than 20 years.

I have been informed by Amelia Gonzalez, the Acting Assisitant 
General Manager of KPFA that there is a proposal to change the time 
slot of Africa Today from 7PM on Monday evenings to 11AM during a 
weekday. This time change will effectively end my ability to produce 
and host Africa Today.

I have attached a letter to the Acting Assistant General Mangager 
which explains my specific concerns regarding the proposed change and 
the impact that it will on my ability to host and produce the program.

Africa Today on KPFA is one of a very few national media programs 
that focuses on the Africa continent. Africa Today is a resource that 
our global community can not afford to lose. Please voice your 
support and work with others to voice collective support for the 
retention of Africa Today, in its current time slot, on KPFA Radio.

Please voice your individual and collective concerns to the following 
members of the KPFA administrative staff at your earliest convenience.

Thank you

Amelia Gonzalez [ amelia at kpfa.org)
Acting Asisting General Manager and Development Director

Ahmad Anderson ( ahmad at pacifica.org)
Interim General Manager




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 26 12:24:30 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:24:30 -0700
Subject: [News] The July 26th Movement and the Gains of the Cuban Revolution
Message-ID: <mailman.89.1280164050.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Commemorate the July 26th Movement and the Gains of the Cuban Revolution

Today marks the 57th anniversary of the historic 
attacks on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Barracks in Cuba.

On July 26, 1953, the Cuban revolutionary forces 
launched two attacks against the Batista Regime, 
one against the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de 
Cuba and the other against the Carlos Manuel de 
Cespedes Barracks in the city of Bayamo. The 
Moncada Barracks was the military center of the 
Batista regime in the south and its second largest and most powerful garrison.

The attacks were executed by a new organization 
that was created in the mid-1952, under the 
leadership of Fidel Castro and Abel Santamar?a. 
It was a clandestine revolutionary organization, 
as yet unnamed, made up of young workers, 
students, employed persons, artisans, campesinos 
from different parts of the island. It had around 
1,500 members and the organization affiliated 
itself with previous revolutionary Cuban figures 
such as Eduardo Chib?s and Jos? Mart?. About 120 
youths were part of these attacks, approximately 
70 of whom were massacred during or after the 
event. Others, including Fidel, were subsequently 
arrested, tortured, tried and/or executed. Many, 
including Fidel, were released after an amnesty 
in May 1955. This amnesty was the result of the 
mass mobilization of Cubans in support of the 
imprisoned rebels. For example, starting in 1955, 
mothers of some prisoners and other Cuban women 
organized a campaign to free the imprisoned 
rebels. Civil society, including editors, 
intellectuals and even political leaders, issued 
a public appeal demanding ?liberty for the 
political prisoners.? That year, the Cuban 
Congress passed a bill granting general amnesty 
to political prisoners. After being signed by 
Batista, the imprisoned rebels were freed.

In response to the attacks, Batista?s regime 
escalated its repression of the progressive 
forces as never before, launching mass arrests of 
any deemed suspicious, imposing extensive 
censorship and suspending constitutional rights. 
In other words, the reaction of the Batista 
regime was to immediately and viciously 
criminalize the youth for their aspirations for a 
better world. They were attacked as violent, 
troublemakers and slandered. Batista?s regime 
knew very well that though the forces were 
defeated, it would inspire the Cuban youth and 
revolutionaries, all those who wanted a new Cuba, 
to see the possibility of it, to think bravely and defiantly.

It is also important to put these events in a 
broader historical context for Cuba. For 
centuries, the Cuban people fought for their 
liberation from the yoke of colonialism. This 
struggle was waged by a population predominantly 
made up of the descendents of African slaves 
brought into Cuba after the indigenous population 
was wiped out, and mulattos. This history 
showcases many amazing fighters and leaders still 
venerated in Cuba and around the world today such 
as Jose Marti. As the 1800s came to a close, the 
revolutionary Cuban forces were ever nearing 
their dream of liberation and dignity. A Republic 
was established through these efforts. Yet the 
U.S., the new rising Empire, would not stand for 
this. Through aggressive policies and coups 
d??tat, the Batista regime was brought into power 
with its unprecedented servility to the U.S. and 
its interests, undermining the Republic and its 
Constitution. In this context emerged what is 
called the Centenary Generation, the generation 
led by Fidel Castro, synthesizing 50 years of 
struggle against servile U.S. governments in 
Cuba. At that time, the youth were at the 
forefront of the struggle, and the University of 
Havana became one of the centers of opposition to 
the government. Thus, the July 26 attacks were a 
continuation of a long history of struggle in 
Cuba, and were a link in a long chain that led to the 1959 Revolution.

Though the battle was lost that day, it made it 
possible for the war to be won, to liberate Cuba 
from U.S. dictate and establish a people?s 
government. Thus, the significance is that of 
taking a stand. The Cuban people planted their 
flag and said to all those willing, here is the 
battle, here is where to follow. Today, the 
Barracks are now a school and the Museum of the 
Revolution. The date on which the attack took 
place, July 26, 1953, was adopted as the name of 
the revolutionary July 26th Movement which 
eventually took power in 1959. When Fidel was 
arrested after the attacks, he defended himself 
in the court. His four-hour defence was recorded 
by the court and became the platform for the July 26th Movement.

Some passages of his defense entitled ?History Will Absolve Me?:

?
 Fundamental matters of principle are being 
debated here, the right of [people] men to be 
free is on trial, the very foundations of our 
existence as a civilized and democratic nation are in the balance.

?Why were we sure of the people?s support? When 
we speak of the people we are not talking about 
those who live in comfort, the conservative 
elements of the nation, who welcome any 
repressive regime, any dictatorship, any 
despotism, prostrating themselves before the 
masters of the moment until they grind their 
foreheads into the ground. When we speak of 
struggle and we mention the people we mean the 
vast unredeemed masses, those to whom everyone 
makes promises and who are deceived by all; we 
mean the people who yearn for a better, more 
dignified and more just nation; who are moved by 
ancestral aspirations to justice, for they have 
suffered injustice and mockery generation after 
generation; those who long for great and wise 
changes in all aspects of their life; people who, 
to attain those changes, are ready to give even 
the very last breath they have when they believe 
in something or in someone, especially when they 
believe in themselves. The first condition of 
sincerity and good faith in any endeavor is to do 
precisely what nobody else ever does, that is, to 
speak with absolute clarity, without fear. The 
demagogues and professional politicians who 
manage to perform the miracle of being right 
about everything and of pleasing everyone are, 
necessarily, deceiving everyone about everything. 
The revolutionaries must proclaim their ideas 
courageously, define their principles and express 
their intentions so that no one is deceived, neither friend nor foe.

?But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the 
fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives 
of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.?

from 
http://cubacanada.org/activities/commemorate-the-july-26th-movement-and-the-gains-of-the-cuban-revolution



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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 26 13:25:55 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:25:55 -0700
Subject: [News] Afghan War Leaks Expose Costly, Deceitful March of Folly
Message-ID: <mailman.92.1280165247.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


OpEdNews

Original Content at 
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Afghan-War-Leaks-Expose-Co-by-Ray-McGovern-100726-999.html

----------
July 26, 2010

Afghan War Leaks Expose Costly, Deceitful March of Folly

By Ray McGovern

The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan 
have been laid bare in an indisputable way just days before the House 
of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 
billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly 
needed at home.

On Sunday, the Web site Wikileaks posted 75,000 reports written 
mostly by U.S. forces in Afghanistan during a six-year period from 
January 2004 to December 2009. The authenticity of the material 
published under the title 
"<http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010>Afghan War 
Diaries" is not in doubt.

The New York Times, which received an embargoed version of the 
documents from Wikileaks, devoted six pages of its Monday editions to 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26isi.html?_r=1&hp>several 
articles on the disclosures, which reveal how the Afghan War slid 
into its current morass while the Bush administration concentrated 
U.S. military efforts on Iraq.

Wikileaks also gave advanced copies to the British newspaper, The 
Guardian, and the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, thus guaranteeing 
that the U.S. Fawning Corporate Media could not ignore these 
classified cables the way it did five years ago with the "Downing 
Street Memo," a leaked British document which described how 
intelligence was "fixed" around President George W. Bush's 
determination to invade Iraq.

The Washington Post also led its Monday editions with a lengthy 
article about the Wikileaks' disclosure of the Afghan War reports.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the new evidence of a foundering 
war in Afghanistan will lead to a public groundswell of opposition to 
expending more billions of dollars there when the money is so 
critically needed to help people to keep their jobs, their homes and 
their personal dignity in the United States.

But there may be new hope that the House of Representatives will find 
the collective courage to deny further funding for feckless bloodshed 
in Afghanistan that seems more designed to protect political flanks 
in Washington than the military perimeters of U.S. bases over there.

Assange on Pentagon Papers

Wikileaks leader Julian Assange compared the release of "The Afghan 
War Diaries" to Daniel Ellsberg's release in 1971 of the Pentagon 
Papers. Those classified documents revealed the duplicitous arguments 
used to justify the Vietnam War and played an important role in 
eventually getting Congress to cut off funding.

Ellsberg's courageous act was the subject of a recent Oscar-nominated 
documentary, entitled "The Most Dangerous Man in America," named 
after one of the less profane sobriquets thrown Ellsberg's way by 
then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

I imagine Dan is happy at this point to cede that particular 
honorific to the Wikileaks' leaker, who is suspected of being Pfc. 
Bradley Manning, a young intelligence specialist in Iraq who was 
recently detained and charged with leaking classified material to Wikileaks.

An earlier Wikileaks' disclosure also reportedly from Manning 
revealed video of a U.S. helicopter crew cavalierly gunning down 
about a dozen Iraqi men, including two Reuters journalists, as they 
walked along a Baghdad street.

Wikileaks declined to say whether Manning was the source of the 
material. However, possibly to counter accusations that the leaker 
(allegedly Manning) acted recklessly in releasing thousands of secret 
military records, Wikileaks said it was still withholding 15,000 
reports "as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source."

After Ellsberg was identified as the Pentagon Papers leaker in 1971, 
he was indicted and faced a long prison sentence if convicted. 
However, a federal judge threw out the charges following disclosures 
of the Nixon administration's own abuses, such as a break-in at the 
office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

In public speeches over the past several years, Ellsberg has been 
vigorously pressing for someone to do what he did, this time on the 
misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ellsberg also has praised 
Assange for providing a means for the documents to reach the public.

Ellsberg and other members of The Truth Telling Coalition established 
on Sept. 9, 2004, have been appealing to government officials who 
encounter "deception and cover-up" on vital issues to opt for 
"unauthorized truth telling." [At the end of this story, see full 
text of the group's letter, which I signed.]

Emphasizing that "citizens cannot make informed choices if they do 
not have the facts," the Truth Telling Coalition challenged officials 
to give primary allegiance to the Constitution, and noted the 
readiness of groups like the ACLU and The Project on Government 
Oversight (POGO) to offer advice and support.

What's New?

In a taped interview, Assange noted in his understated way that, with 
the Internet, the "situation is markedly different" from Pentagon 
Papers days. "More material can be pushed to bigger audiences, and 
much sooner."

Also, the flow of information can evade the obstructions of 
traditional news gatekeepers who failed so miserably to inform the 
American people about the Bush administration's deceptions before the Iraq War.

People all over the world can get "the whole wad at once" and put the 
various reports into context, which "is not something that has 
previously occurred; that is something that can only be brought about 
as a result of the Internet," Assange said.

However, Assange also recognized the value of involving the 
traditional news media to ensure that the reports got maximum 
attention. So, he took a page from Ellsberg's experience by creating 
some competitive pressure among major news outlets, giving the 75,000 
reports to the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. 
Beginning Sunday afternoon, all three posted articles about the huge 
dump of information.

Assange noted that the classified material includes many 
heart-rending incidents that fit into the mosaic of a larger human 
catastrophe. These include one depicted in Der Spiegel's reportage of 
accidental killings on June 17, 2007, when U.S. Special Forces fired 
five rockets at a Koran school in which a prominent al-Qaeda 
functionary was believed to be hiding.

When the smoke cleared, the Special Forces found no terrorist, but 
rather six dead children in the rubble of the school and another who 
died shortly after.

Role of Pakistan

Perhaps the most explosive revelations disclose the double game being 
played by the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence 
(ISI). Der Spiegel reported: "The documents clearly show that this 
Pakistani intelligence agency is the most important accomplice the 
Taliban has outside of Afghanistan."

The documents also show ISI envoys not only are present when 
insurgent commanders hold war councils, but also give specific orders 
to carry out assassinations -- including, according to one report, an 
attempt on the life of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in August 2008.

Former Pakistani intelligence chief, Gen. Hamid Gul, is depicted as 
an important source of aid to the Taliban, and even, in another 
report, as a "leader" of the insurgents. The reports show Gul 
ordering suicide attacks, and describe him as one of the most 
important suppliers of weaponry to the Talban.

Though the Pakistani government has angrily denied U.S. government 
complaints about Gul and the ISI regarding secret ties to the Taliban 
and even to al-Qaeda, the new evidence must raise questions about 
what the Pakistanis have been doing with the billions of dollars that 
Washington has given them.

Two Ex-Generals Got It Right

We have another patriotic truth-teller to thank for leaking the texts 
of cables that Ambassador (and former Lt. Gen.) Karl Eikenberry sent 
to Washington on Nov. 6 and 9, 2009, several weeks before President 
Barack Obama made his fateful decision to send 30,000 more troops to 
Afghanistan.

In a somewhat condescending tone, Eikenberry described the request 
from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then commander of allied forces in 
Afghanistan, for more troops as "logical and compelling within his 
narrow mandate to define the needs" of the military campaign.

But then Eikenberry warned repeatedly about "unaddressed variables" 
like militants' "sanctuaries" in Pakistan. For example, the ambassador wrote:

"More troops won't end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries 
remain " and Pakistan views its strategic interests as best served by 
a weak neighbor."

In Eikenberry's final try at informing the White House discussion (in 
his cable of Nov. 9), the ambassador warned pointedly of the risk 
that "we will become more deeply engaged here with no way to 
extricate ourselves."

At the time, it seemed that Eikenberry's message was getting through 
to the White House. On Nov. 7, Der Spiegel published an interview 
with National Security Adviser (former Marine General) James Jones, 
who was asked whether he agreed with Gen. McChrystal that a 
substantial troop increase was needed. Jones replied:

"Generals always ask for more troops; I believe we will not solve the 
problem with more troops alone. You can keep on putting troops in, 
and you could have 200,000 troops there and Afghanistan will swallow 
them up as it has done in the past."

However, McChrystal and his boss, then-Central Command chief Gen. 
David Petraeus pressed the case for more troops, a position that had 
strong support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Vice 
President Dick Cheney, key hawks in Congress and Washington's 
neoconservative-dominated opinion circles.

After months of internal debate, President Obama finally caved in and 
gave McChrystal nearly all the troops that he had requested. 
(McChrystal has since been replaced by Petraeus as commander of 
forces in Afghanistan.)

Despite the fact that the Wikileaks disclosures offer fresh support 
for the doubters on the Afghan War escalation, Jones acted as the 
good soldier on Sunday, decrying the unauthorized release of 
classified information, calling Wikileaks "irresponsible."

Jones also lectured the Pakistanis:

"Pakistan's military and intelligence services must continue their 
strategic shift against insurgent groups. The balance must shift 
decisively against al-Qaeda and its extremist allies. U.S. support 
for Pakistan will continue to be focused on building Pakistani 
capacity to root out violent extremist groups."

[Note: Okay; he's a general. But the grammatical mood is just a shade 
short of imperative. And the tone is imperial/colonial through and 
through. I'll bet the Pakistanis are as much swayed by that approach 
as they have been by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's admonitions 
not to be concerned about India just terrorists.]

And regarding "progress" in Afghanistan? Jones added that "the U.S. 
and its allies have scored several significant blows against the insurgency."

However, that's not the positive spin that Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. 
Mike Mullen was offering just four weeks ago. On his way to Kabul, 
again, Mullen spoke of "recent setbacks in the Afghan campaign."

"We underestimated some of the challenges" in Marja, the rural area 
of Helmand province that was cleared in March by U.S. Marines, only 
to have Taliban fighters return. "They're coming back at night; the 
intimidation is still there," Mullen said.

Of the much more ambitious (and repeatedly delayed) campaign to 
stabilize the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Mullen said: "It's 
going to take until the end of the year to know where we are there."

Would you say yes to an additional $33.5 billion for this fool's errand?

This article appeared first on Consortiumnews.com.

Text of 2004 Appeal from Truth Telling Coalition follows:

September 9, 2004

APPEAL TO: Current Government Officials

FROM: The Truth-Telling Coalition

It is time for unauthorized truth telling.

Citizens cannot make informed choices if they do not have the 
facts--for example, the facts that have been wrongly concealed about 
the ongoing war in Iraq: the real reasons behind it, the prospective 
costs in blood and treasure, and the setback it has dealt to efforts 
to stem terrorism. Administration deception and cover-up on these 
vital matters has so far been all too successful in misleading the public.

Many Americans are too young to remember Vietnam. Then, as now, 
senior government officials did not tell the American people the 
truth. Now, as then, insiders who know better have kept their 
silence, as the country was misled into the most serious foreign 
policy disaster since Vietnam.

Some of you have documentation of wrongly concealed facts and 
analyses that--if brought to light--would impact heavily on public 
debate regarding crucial matters of national security, both foreign 
and domestic. We urge you to provide that information now, both to 
Congress and, through the media, to the public.

Thanks to our First Amendment, there is in America no broad Officials 
Secrets Act, nor even a statutory basis for the classification 
system. Only very rarely would it be appropriate to reveal 
information of the three types whose disclosure has been expressly 
criminalized by Congress: communications intelligence, nuclear data, 
and the identity of US intelligence operatives. However, this 
administration has stretched existing criminal laws to cover other 
disclosures in ways never contemplated by Congress.

There is a growing network of support for whistleblowers. In 
particular, for anyone who wishes to know the legal implications of 
disclosures they may be contemplating, the ACLU stands ready to 
provide pro bono legal counsel, with lawyer-client privilege. The 
Project on Government Oversight (POGO) will offer advice on whistle 
blowing, dissemination and relations with the media.

Needless to say, any unauthorized disclosure that exposes your 
superiors to embarrassment entails personal risk. Should you be 
identified as the source, the price could be considerable, including 
loss of career and possibly even prosecution. Some of us know from 
experience how difficult it is to countenance such costs. But 
continued silence brings an even more terrible cost, as our leaders 
persist in a disastrous course and young Americans come home in 
coffins or with missing limbs.

This is precisely what happened at this comparable stage in the 
Vietnam War. Some of us live with profound regret that we did not at 
that point expose the administration's dishonesty and perhaps prevent 
the needless slaughter of 50,000 more American troops and some 2 to 3 
million Vietnamese over the next ten years. We know how misplaced 
loyalty to bosses, agencies, and careers can obscure the higher 
allegiance all government officials owe the Constitution, the 
sovereign public, and the young men and women put in harm's way. We 
urge you to act on those higher loyalties.

A hundred forty thousand young Americans are risking their lives 
every day in Iraq for dubious purpose. Our country has urgent need of 
comparable moral courage from its public officials. Truth telling is 
a patriotic and effective way to serve the nation. The time for 
speaking out is now.

SIGNATORIES
Appeal from the Truth-Telling Coalition

Edward Costello, Former Special Agent (Counterintelligence), Federal 
Bureau of Investigation

Sibel Edmonds, Former Language Specialist, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Daniel Ellsberg, Former official, U.S. Departments of Defense and State

John D. Heinberg, Former Economist, Employment and Training 
Administration, U.S. Department of Labor

Larry C. Johnson, Former Deputy Director for Anti-Terrorism 
Assistance, Transportation Security, and Special Operations, 
Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism

Lt. Col Karen Kwiatowski, USAF (ret.), who served in the Pentagon's 
Office of Near East Planning

John Brady Kiesling, Former Political Counselor, U.S. Embassy, 
Athens, Department of State

David MacMichael, Former Senior Estimates Officer, National 
Intelligence Council, Central Intelligence Agency

Ray McGovern, Former Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency

Philip G. Vargas, Ph.D., J.D., Dir. Privacy & Confidentiality Study, 
Commission on Federal Paperwork (Author/Director: "The Vargas Report 
on Government Secrecy" -- CENSORED)

Ann Wright, Retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and U.S. Foreign Service Officer




Author's Bio: Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing 
arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. 
He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst 
for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran 
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Back




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 26 15:32:38 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:32:38 -0700
Subject: [News] Chavez: US and Colombia plan to attack Venezuela
Message-ID: <mailman.102.1280172769.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Saturday, July 24, 2010

http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/07/chavez-us-and-colombia-plan-to-attack.html



<http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/07/chavez-us-and-colombia-plan-to-attack.html>Chavez: 
US and Colombia plan to attack Venezuela

By Eva Golinger

Caracas, July 24, 2010 ? Venezuelan President 
Hugo Chavez denounced this Saturday US plans to 
attack his country and overthrow his government. 
During a ceremony celebrating the 227th birthday 
of Independence hero Simon Bolivar, Chavez read 
from a secret memo he had been sent from an 
unnamed source inside the United States.

?Old friend, I haven?t seen you in years. As I 
said to you in my three prior letters, the idea 
remains the generation of a conflict on your 
western border?, read Chavez from the secret missive.

?The latest events confirm all, or almost all, of 
what those here discussed as well as other 
information that I have obtained from above?, the letter continued.

?The preparation phase in the international 
community, with the help of Colombia, is in plain 
execution?, manifested the text, referring to 
last Thursday?s session in the Organization of 
American States (OAS), during which the Colombia 
government accused Venezuela of harboring 
?terrorists? and ?terrorist training camps? and 
gave the Chavez government a ?30-day ultimatum? 
to allow for international intervention.

The letter continued with more details, ?I told 
you before that the events wouldn?t begin before 
the 26th, but for some reason they have moved 
forward several actions that were supposed to be executed afterward?.

?In the United States, the execution phase is 
accelerating, together with a contention force, 
as they call it, towards Costa Rica with the 
pretext of fighting drug trafficking?.

On July 1, the Costan Rican government authorized 
46 US war ships and 7,000 marines into their maritime and land territory.
The true objective of this military mobilization, 
said the letter, is to ?support military operations? against Venezuela.

ASSASSINATION AND OVERTHROW

?There is an agreement between Colombia and the 
US with two objectives: one is Mauricio and the 
other is the overthrow of the government?, 
revealed the document. President Chavez explained 
that ?Mauricio? is a pseudynom used in these communications.

?The military operation is going to happen?, 
warned the text, ?and those from the north will 
do it, but not directly in Caracas?.
?They will hunt ?Mauricio? down outside Caracas, 
this is very important, I repeat, this is very important?.

President Chavez revealed that he had received 
similar letters from the same source alerting him 
to dangerous threats. He received one right 
before the capture of more than 100 Colombian 
paramilitaries in the outskirts of Caracas that 
were part of an assassination plan against the 
Venezuelan head of state, and another in 2002, 
just days before the coup d?etat that briefly 
outsted him from power. ?The letter warned of 
snipers and the coup?, explained Chavez, ?and it 
was right, the information was true, but we were unable to act to prevent it?.

US MILITARY EXPANSION

This information comes on the heels of the 
decision last Thursday to break relations between 
Colombia and Venezuela, made by President Chavez 
after Colombia?s ?show? in the OAS.

?Uribe is capable of anything?, warned Chavez, 
announcing that the country was on maximum altert 
and the borders were being reinforced.

Last October, Colombia and the US signed a 
military agreement permitting the US to occupy 
seven Colombian bases and to use all Colombian 
territory as needed to complete missions. One of 
the bases in the agreement, Palanquero, was cited 
in May 2009 US Air Force documents as necessary 
to ?conduct full spectrum military operations? in 
South America and combat the threat of ?anti-US governments? in the region.

Palanquero was also signaled as critical to the 
Pentagon?s Global Mobility Strategy, as outlined 
in the February 2009 White Paper: Air Mobility 
Command Global En Route Strategy, ?USSOUTHCOM has 
identified Palanquero, Colombia (German Olano 
Airfield SKPQ), as a cooperative security 
location (CSL). From this location nearly half of 
the continent can be covered by a C-17 without refueling?.

The 2010 Pentagon budget included a $46 million 
USD request to improve the installations at 
Palanquero, in order to support the Command 
Combatant?s ?Theater Posture Strategy? and 
?provide for a unique opportunity for full 
spectrum operations in a critical sub region of 
our hemisphere where security and stability is 
under constant threat from narcotics funded 
terrorist insurgencies, anti-US governments, 
endemic poverty and recurring natural disasters?.

The May 2009 Air Force document further added 
that Palanquero would be used to ?increase our 
capacity to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance 
and Reconnaissance (ISR), improve global 
reach
and expand expeditionary warfare capability?.

In February 2010, the US National Directorate of 
Intelligence (NDI) classified Venezuela as 
?Anti-US Leader? in the region in its annual threat assessment.

The US also maintains forward operation locations 
(small military bases) in Aruba and Curazao, just 
miles off the Venezuelan coast. In recent months, 
the Venezuelan government has denounced 
unauthorized incursions of drone planes and other 
military aircraft into Venezuelan territory, originating from the US bases.

These latest revelations evidence that a serious, 
and unjustified conflict is brewing fast against 
Venezuela, a country with a vibrant democracy and 
the largest oil reserves in the world.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 27 10:32:01 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:32:01 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Colombia=92s_Uribe_takes_dictation_one_last?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?__time?=
Message-ID: <mailman.131.1280241203.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Colombia?s Uribe takes dictation one last time



July 26, 2010

http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/

Colombia: Uribe?s Farewell Spectacle - 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=722>espa?ol

Atilio A. Boron

Translation: Machetera and Manuel Talens

?lvaro Uribe, the empire?s unconditional pawn, 
took his leave from the Colombian presidency with 
a new provocation: the denunciation of FARC camps 
which he claimed to be established on Venezuelan 
territory.  Being neither dimwitted nor lazy, the 
U.S. State Department came out in unconditional 
support of the accusation put forth by Bogot? at 
the Organization of American States (OAS), 
encouraged by the supposed ?resounding? proof 
presented by Uribe, denouncing the government of 
Hugo Ch?vez for allowing the FARC camps to be set 
up and for carrying out various military training 
programs for some 1,500 guerrillas on Venezuelan 
soil.  With amazing insolence, Philip Crowley, 
the State Department spokesperson declared that 
Venezuela?s response [in terminating diplomatic 
relations with Colombia] was ?unfortunate? and 
?petulant? and threatened that ?if Venezuela 
fails to cooperate in whatever follow-on steps 
are made, the United States and other countries 
will obviously take account of that.?  It must be 
remembered that since 2006, the United States has 
included Venezuela in the list of countries that 
are unwilling to cooperate in the struggle 
against terrorism.  Assistant U.S. Secretary of 
State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo 
Valenzuela issued a declaration along the same 
lines, saying that Uribe?s denunciation was ?very 
serious.?  Both statements cast a heavy shadow of 
doubt about the intellectual capabilities of both 
officials and, what?s worse, feed the suspicion 
that with their fondness for lies, the moral 
caliber of both is not all that different from that of ?lvaro Uribe.

It?s obvious that for imperial administrators, 
they will try to make anything that is convenient 
to their interests appear before public opinion 
as something ?serious and overwhelming.?  And 
these were the interests that moved the White 
House to ask for one last ?proof of love? from 
the Colombian leader just a few days before leaving his presidency.

As is commonly known, the file that the DEA, the 
CIA and the FBI have been building on Uribe for 
his intimate and prolonged links with the drug 
cartels keeps the Colombian leader from 
disobeying any kind of order coming from 
Washington, for fear of meeting the same fate as 
the former Panamanian president Manuel A. 
Noriega, and ending his days in a maximum 
security cell in the United States. 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn1>[i]

The absurd claim from Uribe, an inveterate liar, 
comes like manna from heaven in Washington?s push 
to destabilize the Ch?vez government before the 
crucial Venezuelan elections scheduled for 
September 26th and at the same time, it 
legitimizes the impressive program of U.S. 
militarization that is being imposed on Latin 
America; one of whose leading examples has been 
the signed Obama-Uribe treaty through which 
Colombia is ceding at least seven military bases 
for the use of U.S. armed forces.  This is why 
those in the U.S. government pretend to consider 
the proof behind Uribe?s denunciation as ?serious 
and overwhelming,? knowing that it is completely 
unfounded and nothing more than pure verbiage 
backed up with photographic montages.  But lies 
are part of official U.S. discourse, essential 
elements in granting an aura of legitimacy to 
U.S. imperial designs, for a variety of reasons.

These are lies because, in the first place, if 
the FARC controls around 30% of Colombian 
territory (something that is well known in 
Colombia) it?s impossible to make sense of 
partitioning no less than 1,500 men from the 
theatre of operations, sending their leaders to 
vacation in Venezuela, and organizing 85 
guerrilla camps in a neighboring country.  If 
there is a politician who systematically lies in 
our region ? and there are plenty! ? Uribe is the 
crowning example: it?s in Colombia itself where 
the rotting oligarchic state in crisis allows for 
wide swathes of its territory, particularly in 
the jungle zones, to be controlled by guerrillas, 
narco-traffickers and paramilitaries.

After the attack that Colombian forces carried 
out on its territory, various Ecuadoran 
authorities commented that Ecuador?s northern 
border with Colombia is marked by nothing so much 
as a no-man?s land controlled by the 
organizations listed above.  With boundless 
ignorance, Uribe accuses his neighbors of not 
doing what he has amply proven unable to do 
himself: control his own territory.  Closing its 
eyes to this reality, the United States is using 
this false claim to hound the Bolivarian 
government for its lack of collaboration in the 
struggle against drug-trafficking, using the 
?free press? to hide the bothersome fact from the 
public that the greatest worldwide exporter of 
cocaine (as well as drug traffickers) is 
Colombia, militarized by Uribe and thanks to his 
invaluable collaboration, converted into a U.S. 
protectorate.  Given this picture of political 
decay, the complaint that the FARC have taken up 
residence in Venezuela ? with the support and 
complicity of Hugo Ch?vez?s government of all 
things! ? is nothing more than a vulgar deceit in 
the service of empire; an accusation that is so 
completely lacking on any basis as to be taken 
even slightly seriously.  It?s a lie that exposes 
someone as completely unscrupulous as 
Uribe.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn2>[ii]

In the second place, how can it be forgotten that 
Uribe was the man who lied so treacherously when 
his military forces, supported by those of the 
United States, made their incursion onto 
Ecuadoran territory, alleging that they were going after a column of the FARC?

Forensic evidence showed that the guerrillas who 
they were supposedly chasing after a 
confrontation that took place on Colombian 
territory were sleeping ? dressed in pajamas, 
even ? when the attack took place, and therefore, 
what took place at Santa Rosa de Sucumb?os was 
not a battle but a plain and simple 
slaughter.  This operation, carried out shortly 
after midnight on March 1st, 2008, occurred with 
the logistic and material support of  U.S. 
Americans housed at the Manta airbase in Ecuador, 
the only people with the aircraft and technology 
capable of the astonishingly accurate bombing of 
the jungle in the absolute dead of night.

One more example of Uribe?s unhealthy fondness 
for the lie was the story put forth about the 
famous laptop belonging to Ra?l Reyes, which with 
unprecedented technological prowess survived 
unscathed from a bombing that destroyed 
everything in its path and whose hard drive would 
go on to produce extremely valuable information 
about the extensive contacts of Reyes and the 
FARC with all of the enemies of Uribe and the 
United 
States.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn3>[iii]

Third, how can a man be believed, who from the 
presidency of Colombia validated the actions of 
paramilitaries and state terrorism?  On February 
16th of this year, the ?Justice and Peace? unit 
of the Colombian Attorney General?s office 
published a report in which it was revealed that 
more than 4,000 paramilitaries from the United 
Self Defense Forces of Columbia (Autodefensas 
Unidas de Colombia ? AUC) said that they had 
perpetrated 30,470 murders in the period 
beginning in the 1980?s, until their 
?demobilization? in 2003-2006.  Not only that: 
the Colombian Attorney General also took 
statements from paramilitaries accounting for 
1,085 murders, 1,438 forced recruitments of 
minors, 2,530 forced disappearances, 2,326 forced 
displacements and 1,642 extortions, as well as 1,033 kidnappings.

Despite this woeful record, Uribe is considered 
by his bosses in Washington to be a champion in 
the struggle for human 
rights.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn4>[iv] 
In this regard, if the long-awaited Free Trade 
Agreement (FTA) between Colombia and the United 
States has still not been ratified by the U.S. 
Congress, it?s because, as the conservative 
Colombian newspaper El Tiempo points out, in 2009 
alone, the paramilitaries and ?security forces? 
killed 40 trade union leaders, turning Colombia 
into the most dangerous country in the world for 
this kind of activity.  Out of a total of 76 
union leaders killed worldwide, 52% of these 
murders took place in a country that the United 
States considers a paradigmatic example of the 
struggle for human rights and the struggle 
against terrorism.  The United Central of 
Colombian Workers (Central ?nica de Trabajadores 
de Colombia) reported just a few months ago that 
2,721 activists and leaders of that organization 
were killed by ?security forces? since its 
founding in 
1986.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn5>[v] 
Despite this, Colombia?s democratic credentials 
have never been in doubt in Washington. 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn6>[vi]

Fourth, the denouncer is no less than the person 
intellectually and politically responsible for 
the serial murders known as ?false 
positives.?  As pointed out in a series of notes 
published in Colombia by Cr?nicon: The Latin 
American Observer, during these last three years 
of the Uribe government, the balance sheet is 
dismal.  It proved that in response to the 
government?s pressure to show concrete results in 
the struggle against guerrillas, the Colombian 
Army designed and carried out a criminal plan: 
moving through the country?s poorest villages and 
towns with offers of work among the huge masses 
of unemployed, the Army recruited a high number 
of poor, defenseless peasants and marginalized 
youth, who were later killed in cold blood, with 
their bodies dressed up afterwards as guerrillas 
killed in combat, in order to charge the bounty 
set up by the government and obtain bonuses or military career advancement.

According to very conservative estimates, these 
State crimes, perpetrated while the future 
Colombian president, Juan M. Santos, was the 
Defense Minister, surpassed 1,700 cases. 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn7>[vii] 
Another facet of this criminal policy under the 
misnomer of democratic security, is provided in 
the discovery which came to light on February 16, 
2010, of  ?the largest mass grave in modern 
history of the American continent, a horrendous 
discovery that has been made practically 
completely invisible? by the mainstream press in 
Colombia and around the world.  ?The mass grave, 
in La Macarena, in the Department of Meta, 
contains the remains of at least 2,000 people, 
(and was discovered) thanks to the perseverance 
of the family members of the disappeared and the 
visit of a delegation of union members and 
members of the British parliament who came to 
Colombia in December of 2009 to investigate the 
human rights situation.? It?s worth adding that 
this area had been an object of close attention 
by the Colombian armed forces since 2005, with 
the awful results that were recently 
revealed.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn8>[viii]

As with all the state terrorism that struck the 
region during the 1970?s, the crimes against 
humanity committed by their perpetrators also had 
a financial basis.  In the case of Uribe?s 
Colombia, with his troupe of bloodthirsty freaks, 
millions of hectares left behind by the 
campesinos in their desperate exodus from the 
bombings and indiscriminate slaughters they faced 
were parceled out between the corrupt armed 
forces, the paramilitaries and the 
drug-traffickers.  As Jomary Orteon Osorio, from 
the Colombian Lawyers Collective stated at a 
conference of the U.N. Committee on Economic, 
Social and Cultural Rights (OHCHR) convened in 
Geneva at the beginning of May this year, the 
figure for displaced peasants would reach 
4,500,000, and their lands would later be 
transferred, to the great benefit of those 
charged with their displacement: to the 
landowners and agribusiness, the sponsors and 
financers of the paramilitaries.  At this same 
conference it was established that despite these 
?successes? of the Uribe government, the number 
of displaced persons continues to grow at the 
rate of 150,000 people per year.  The Colombian 
Planning Minister, Esteban Piedrahita Uribe, head 
of the Colombian delegation at the conference, 
did not deny the allegations and limited himself 
to saying that ?we have confiscated 2,000,000 
hectares from criminal groups who illegally 
seized these lands and now justice will decide 
their return to their rightful owners.? 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn9>[ix] 
In any case, it must be emphasized that the 
calculation of the number of expropriated 
hectares in this savage remaking of the process 
of primitive accumulation of capital that Marx 
described in his famous Chapter 24 of the first 
volume of Capital is subject to heated 
controversy.  There are those who maintain that 
the number of hectares transferred in this manner 
reaches 6 million, but there are others who put 
the figure at around 10 million.  In any case, 
whatever the number finally established beyond 
any doubt, it?s certain that if the policy of 
democratic security did anything at all, it was 
to secure the expropriation of the peasant masses 
and their holdings in favor of capitalist 
agribusiness. 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn10>[x]

This is the man who now raises his accusing 
finger against the Bolivarian revolution.  It?s 
obvious that it is just one more maneuver, 
dictated by the empire?s strategists, to harass 
the government of Hugo Ch?vez and legitimize the 
policy of ?hard power? of which it seems Obama 
has become even more enamored than his 
ignominious predecessor, despite the official 
declarations and writings of certain analysts 
close to the White House such as Joseph Nye, who 
insistently speak of the advantages of ?soft 
power? (traditional diplomacy) or ?smart power,? 
(intelligent power, new diplomacy) over the high 
cost and brutality of the former.  However, the 
empire insists on the hard power at its 
impressive military disposition: therefore, the 
bases in Colombia; in Aruba and Cura?ao only a 
few kilometers away from the Venezuelan coast; 
those in both El Salvador and Honduras and, now, 
the authorization to introduce no less than 7,000 
Marines and all kinds of weapons as well as 
aircraft carriers, helicopters, amphibious ships 
and latest generation airplanes in neighboring Costa Rica.

That?s also the reason for the Fourth Fleet?s 
presence. In this way, Uribe?s government 
performs a service of extraordinary importance in 
the facilitation of imperialism?s destabilizing, 
counter-constituent plans: unable to protect its 
586 kilometer border with Ecuador, where it has 
dedicated barely 8 tiny military detachments, and 
even less unable to do so along the 2,216 
kilometers of the Colombian-Venezuelan border ? 
transformed into a free-for-all zone for drug 
dealers and paramilitary ? it is trying by all 
possible means to create the conditions that 
would justify U.S. military intervention in South 
America; for the moment, the tension between 
Colombia and Venezuela following the presidential 
succession remains, preventing Santos from 
modifying the agenda of permanent confrontation 
instituted by Uribe against the Bolivarian 
revolution and muddying the waters so that Ch?vez 
will arrive at the September elections totally 
worn out and internationally harassed.

Worried about his personal future and burdened by 
the specter of Noriega rotting away in a Yankee 
jail cell, or being sued before the International 
Criminal Court, Uribe is making every effort 
until his last day in office to show his total 
submission to the dictates of imperialism. For 
that reason two things are of utmost importance: 
exposure of the man who is reporting the crime 
and demanding the UNASUR?s immediate intervention 
to deactivate Washington?s plans for Our America. 
This is not a case for the OAS (an organization 
that failed to defuse Uribe?s provocation) but 
for UNASUR, which with this incident, will be put 
to the test. Hopefully this newborn organization 
of South American countries will act immediately 
? right away ? otherwise, it may be too late to 
avoid the serious consequences of all kinds that 
could result if the warmongering U.S. project 
implemented by Washington and its Latin American 
proxies is carried to its conclusion.

[i] See the following declassified document at 
the U.S. National Security Archive: ?U.S. 
INTELLIGENCE LISTED COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT URIBE 
AMONG ?IMPORTANT COLOMBIAN NARCO-TRAFFICKERS? IN 1991?, in:

<http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/index.htm>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/index.htm

<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_ednref2>[ii] 
At a border more than 2,000 kilometers long with 
few natural demarcations like great rivers, lakes 
or mountain ranges, many people (not just 
ordinary ones but also drug dealers, 
paramilitary, smugglers, criminals) can cross 
back and forth as many times as they please. But 
to assume that the Ch?vez government endorses the 
establishment of sanctuaries for guerrilla 
training camps in Venezuela  only speaks of the 
absolute dishonesty and lack of moral scruples of 
Uribe and his bosses in Washington.

<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_ednref3>[iii] 
See the compelling evidence contributed by 
Margarita Vallejo and Horacio L?pez in , El 
ataque de Colombia en territorio ecuatoriano : 
detr?s de las palabras y los hechos (Buenos 
Aires: Ediciones del Centro Cultural de la Cooperaci?n, 2009)

<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_ednref4>[iv] 
See 
<http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/%20secciones/nota/66984-NN/ex-paramilitares-colombianos-%20reconocen-haber-cometido-cerca-de-30-mil-500-asesinatos/>http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/ 
secciones/nota/66984-NN/ex-paramilitares-colombianos- 
reconocen-haber-cometido-cerca-de-30-mil-500-asesinatos/

[v] Cf. 
<http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/justicia/asesinados-40-sindicalistas-el-ano-pasado-en-colombia-denuncia-organizacion-de-trabajadores_7120268-1>http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/justicia/asesinados-40-sindicalistas-el-ano-pasado-en-colombia-denuncia-organizacion-de-trabajadores_7120268-1

[vi]  To the previous should be added the 27 
journalists killed for exercising their 
profession during the eight years of Uribe`s 
rule. Other sources claim a much larger number.

[vii] Cf. Fernando Arellano?s Cronic?n 
<http://www.cronicon.net/paginas/cronicon_menu.htm>http://www.cronicon.net/paginas/cronicon_menu.htm

[viii]  Cf. 
<http://www.publico.es/internacional/288773/aparece/colombia/fosa/comun/cad%C3%A1veres>http://www.publico.es/internacional/288773/aparece/colombia/fosa/comun/cad?veres; 
and also

<http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=99507>http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=99507

[ix] See the website of the conservative radio 
and television network Cadena Caracol, May 4th, 
2010 
<http://www.caracol.com.co/nota.aspx?id=1019108>http://www.caracol.com.co/nota.aspx?id=1019108

[x] See the data provided by the MOVICE, 
Movimiento Nacional de V?ctimas de Cr?menes de 
Estado: 4.5 million displaced peasants as of 2009:

<http://www.movimientodevictimas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=278&Itemid=64>http://www.movimientodevictimas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=278&Itemid=64

Expropriated agricultural surface, 2009:

<http://www.movimientodevictimas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=274&Itemid=69>http://www.movimientodevictimas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=274&Itemid=69

Argentinean sociologist and author Atilio Boron is a friend of Tlaxcala.

Machetera and Manuel Talens are members of 
<http://www.tlaxcala.es/>Tlaxcala, the network of 
translators for linguistic diversity. This 
translation may be reprinted as long as the 
content remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translators are cited.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 27 11:17:18 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:17:18 -0700
Subject: [News] Palestine - Hey Hollywood,
 time to put your money where your  morality is
Message-ID: <mailman.140.1280243849.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



'Hope' Floats: Hey Hollywood, time to put your money where your morality is

By 
<http://palestinethinktank.com/author/nima-shirazi/>Nima 
Shirazi ? Jul 27th, 2010
http://palestinethinktank.com/2010/07/27/nima-shirazi-hope-floats-hey-hollywood-time-to-put-your-money-where-your-morality-is/

A coalition of nearly twenty U.S.-based human 
rights and peace groups has joined the global 
justice community and numerous foreign 
governments in vowing to send more humanitarian 
aid ships to break the 
<http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/06/201061452646659588.html>illegal 
Israeli blockade of Gaza this coming Fall. The 
coalition, united under the mantle 
<http://ustogaza.org/>US To Gaza, includes 
activist organizations such as CodePink, Jews Say 
No, Veterans For Peace, Voices for Creative 
Non-Violence, and Jewish Voice For Peace.

In the wake of the 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/iara-lee/the-video-israel-doesnt-w_b_621788.html>deadly 
Israeli raid on an international 
<http://www.sott.net/articles/show/209749-Israel-Deliberately-Murdered-Civilians-Aboard-Freedom-Flotilla-Says-Eyewitness-and-Victim>flotilla 
carrying over 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid and 
hundreds of civilian passengers, during which 
<http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2010/06/putting-names-to-faces.html>nine 
activists were 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/04/gaza-flotilla-activists-autopsy-results>murdered 
(if not outright 
<http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=178617>executed) 
by Israeli commandos in international waters, the 
global call to end the US-backed Israeli siege has grown even more forceful.

Later this year, boats from Europe, Canada, South 
Africa, India, and the Middle East are expected 
to set sail for Gaza once again. US To Gaza, 
which states on its 
<http://ustogaza.blogspot.com/>website that 
"America pays for the blockade with our tax 
dollars; Americans must join together to end this 
collective punishment of 1.5 million 
Palestinians," aims to add a vital American 
element to this new Freedom Flotilla.

The U.S. boat, which will be named The Audacity 
of Hope (irony intended), is expected to carry an 
American peace delegation of forty to sixty 
passengers and will join its international 
flotilla partners en route. But purchasing a 
suitable ship, securing a sailing crew, obtaining 
the needed licenses and registration, gathering 
tons of humanitarian aid, and sailing for Gaza is 
a costly endeavor. It is estimated that at least 
$370,000 needs to be raised from private donors 
in the next month for the U.S. ship to become, 
not merely hopeful audacity, but a necessary reality.

All in all, $370,000 isn't that much money. For 
instance, South Carolina Republican Congressman 
Joe Wilson 
<http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/10/you-lie-outburst-a-fundraising-boon-for-rep-joe-wilson.html>raised 
hundreds of thousands of 
<http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/11/wilson.fundraising/index.html>dollars 
from 
<http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/10/joe-wilsons-you-lie-outburst-h.html>individual 
donors giving less than $200 just because he 
called Barack Obama a liar. If a jackass like 
Wilson can raise that kind of money for shouting 
a 
<http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/09/joe-wilson/joe-wilson-south-carolina-said-obama-lied-he-didnt/>disingenuous 
falsehood, raising funds for a just cause like 
breaking the illegal Gaza blockade shouldn't be that hard.

Sure, the fund-raising goal can be hit with 3,700 
people each pledging $100 or a mere 370 donations 
of $1,000 each. But why is the bar for funding 
justice and fighting illegal 
<http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE15/021/2008/en>collective 
punishment so low? Where are the big donors who 
could single-handedly buy a boat and subsidize 
the entire delegation? Why does it seem like such 
a stretch for American supporters of human rights 
and international law to send an armada of siege-breaking ships to Gaza?

Perhaps, in order to open borders and ship a 
little bit of hope to suffering Palestinians in 
the Middle East, US to Gaza organizers should be 
looking for a lot of financial support from open wallets on the West Coast.

Hollywood has no shortage of outspoken Israel 
supporters, ethnic cleansing enthusiasts, and 
racist, right-wing nutjobs. The Zionism, publicly 
professed or not, of famous musicians and movie 
stars takes many forms and runs the gamut of 
willful ignorance to actively insane.

There are those who ignore or condemn the 
<http://bdsmovement.net/>Boycott, Divestment, and 
Sanctions Movement and promote Israeli 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/udi-aloni-seinfeld-you-were-wrong-to-condemn-our-toronto-protest-1.7469>hasbara 
like 
<http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2008/02/all-you-need-is-apartheid.html>Paul 
McCartney, 
<http://www.popeater.com/2010/06/18/elton-john-israel-tel-aviv-concert/>Elton 
John, 
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6822777.ece>Madonna, 
<http://usacbi.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/rod-stewart-concert-not-cancelled-but-boycott-momentum-growing/>Rod 
Stewart, Bob 
<http://ellissharp.blogspot.com/2005/09/bob-dylans-racist-song_25.html>Dylan, 
<http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/09/24/entertainment/main5336146.shtml>Leonard 
Cohen, 
<http://palestinenote.com/cs/blogs/news/archive/2010/07/01/hits-and-misses-which-musicians-are-boycotting-israel.aspx>Metallica, 
Rihanna, 
<http://www.thejc.com/news/israel-news/35649/missy-elliot-ignores-israel-boycott-campaign>Missy 
Elliot, 
<http://news.softpedia.com/news/Adam-Sandler-Wants-to-Fight-Against-Terrorism-33306.shtml>Adam 
Sandler, 
<http://fpfd.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/is-alex-trebek-putting-u-s-interests-in-jeopardy/>Alex 
Trebek, 
<http://current.com/entertainment/movies/90948471_we-dont-need-another-blacklist.htm>Seth 
Rogen, Robert Duvall, Halle Berry, Lenny Kravitz, 
Ed Zwick, Chazz Palminteri, Paul Reiser, 
<http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/September2009/10/c4132.html>David 
Cronenberg, Norman Jewison, Saul Rubinek, 
<http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/news/seinfeld-sacha-baron-cohen-and-natalie-portman-slam-toronto-film-festival-protest-1.7828>Jerry 
Seinfeld, Lisa Kudrow, Sacha Baron Cohen, 
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollywoodjew/item/toronto_protest_escalates_as_stars_sign_federation_ad_against_tel_aviv_boyc/>Minnie 
Driver, and Natalie Portman (who was also a proud 
<http://www.natalieportman.com/articles/nparticles_en.php?viewarticle=1&article_number=363>research 
assistant of Alan Dershowitz and is thanked in 
his appalling book The Case for Israel); there 
are those who 
<http://ayulittleone.blogsome.com/images/terrorad081706.jpg>oppose 
resistance to Israeli aggression and expansion 
and laud Israeli assaults that take the lives of 
thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians 
like actors Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, 
Bruce Willis, Danny De Vito, Don Johnson, James 
Woods, Kelly Preston, Patricia Heaton, Doug 
Liman, Gary Sinise, Kristen Chenowith, Michael 
Chiklis, Vivica A. Fox, Nicole Kidman, Pat Sajak, 
and William Hurt, along with filmmakers like 
Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, William 
Friedkin, Ivan Reitman, Richard Donner, and Sam Raimi.

There are those, like producer Lawrence Bender, 
who see Israel as an eternal victim, besieged by 
oppressive Palestinians, and 
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/community_briefs/article/israel_to_seek_celebrity_support_20030829/>claim 
that "Nobody realizes how badly the Israelis are 
suffering. Obviously the Palestinians are 
suffering ? but people need to understand that 
Israel needs help" and there are those, like 
actor Joshua Malina, who are 
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/community_briefs/article/israel_to_seek_celebrity_support_20030829/>baffled 
by the 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-israel-feels-under-siege-like-a-victim-an-underdog-1886332.html>suggestion 
that "somehow Israel is the bully and the Palestinians are the underdog."

There are Zionist zealots like 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk0513.html>John 
Malkovich and 
<http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2010/05/ridiculest-bill-mahers-cultural.html>Bill 
Maher and there's also 
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/22/dear-mr-president-jon-voight/>Jon 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/actor-jon-voight-god-gave-this-land-to-the-jewish-people-1.285266>Voigt.

There are celebrities who advocate for peace, 
love, and understanding, like 
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_n5_v57/ai_13705084/pg_5/>Richard 
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/community_briefs/article/israel_to_seek_celebrity_support_20030829/>Dreyfuss, 
yet somehow believe a "Jewish" state isn't 
inherently discriminatory. There's Jason 
Alexander, who, despite his 
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7768/is_20100527/ai_n54115675/>work 
with the two-state promoting 
<http://www.onevoicemovement.org/>OneVoice/<http://imaginepeace.com/archives/7337>Imagine 
Peace project, was an 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4iCCxYdUlI&feature=player_embedded>honored 
guest at last year's Friends of the Israeli 
Defense Forces [sic] Fundraising Gala and shill 
for Jewish 
<http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/03/jewish-life-tv-promoting-radical-settler-ideology-endorsed-by-jason-alexander-and-sponsored-by-jdate/>television 
programming that endorses violent, fanatical 
Zionist settler ideologies. There are fashion 
designers like Elie Tahari, who 
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=170694>donated 
a whopping $100,000 at this year's IDF love-fest in March.

With friends like these, it's no wonder that the 
IDF, a foreign military that oppresses and 
occupies an indigenous population, 
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=170694>raised 
over $20 million in one night at the 
Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. But donors here in 
the United States don't only fund the Occupation, 
they also fund 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/08/us-settlers-hebron-fund-israeli>illegal 
Jewish settlements ? to the tune of 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/world/middleeast/06settle.html?_r=2&hp>tax-free 
hundreds of millions over the past decade ? that 
have now 
<http://adalahny.org/index.php/press-releases/38-press-release-other/329-release-hebron-mets-cancel>aggressively 
stolen and 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/exposed-the-truth-about-israels-land-grab-in-the-west-bank-2020110.html>colonized 
over 42% of the West Bank.

So where are their anti-occupation, 
pro-international law counterparts, especially 
the ones with equally deep pockets? The truth is they're everywhere.

 From 
<http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/07/28/overcoming-speechlessness-alice-walker-in-gaza.htm>Alice 
<http://www.alicewalkersblog.com/2009/07/overcoming-speechlessness-poet.html>Walker 
to 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvMoGAy7q9c>Vanessa 
Redgrave, 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2009/09/toronto-film-fest-protest-grows-to-over-1000-supporters-including-harry-belafonte-julie-christie-and-viggo-mortensen.html>Harry 
Belafonte to 
<http://torontodeclaration.blogspot.com/>Viggo 
Mortensen, Julie Christie, Wallace Shawn, 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/28/usa.israel>Alan 
Rickman, 
<http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/02/26/please-listen-before-it-is-too-late.htm>Jonathan 
Demme, Stephen King, Ralph Fiennes, Bill Irwin, 
Tilda Swinton, Wim Wenders, Uma Thurman, Debra 
Winger, 
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413>Tony 
Kushner, 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2009/09/roger-ebert-amends-his-review-of-the-toronto-protest.html>Roger 
Ebert, 
<http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=2122&CategoryId=14>Richard 
Gere, 
<http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_05_22_cusack.mp3>John 
Cusack, 
<http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=22619>Sally 
Kirkland, Terry Gilliam, 
<http://palfest.org/authorsblog.html>Michael 
<http://palfest.org/Author/michael_palin.html>Palin, 
<http://www.thejewishpress.com/pageroute.do/37560>Danny 
Glover, Oliver Stone, Ed Asner, 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/dec/15/israel.guardianletters>Sophie 
Fiennes, 
<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0614-02.htm>Casey 
Kasem, and Jeremy Pikser, celebrity support for 
Palestinian freedom and an end to the Israeli 
occupation and blockade is widespread in Tinseltown.

Actresses Salma Hayek, Halle Berry, Drew 
Barrymore, Brooke Shields, Andie MacDowell, Lucy 
Liu, Whitney Houston and Sharon Stone all had 
their pictures 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10045.shtml>removed 
from the website of blood diamond dealer Lev 
Leviev after being alerted to Leviev's criminal 
funding of illegal West Bank settlements.

Musicians like 
<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0614-02.htm>Mos 
Def, Laurie Anderson, Boots Riley, Steve Earle, 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2009/09/toronto-film-fest-protest-grows-to-over-1000-supporters-including-harry-belafonte-julie-christie-and-viggo-mortensen.html>David 
Byrne, 
<http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/02/26/please-listen-before-it-is-too-late.htm>Neil 
Young, and 
<http://www.artistsagainstapartheid.org/?p=960>Santana, 
all publicly oppose Israel's systematic 
oppression and land theft and support the 
<http://www.pacbi.org/>Palestinian Campaign for 
the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel. 
<http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2009/01/02/annie_lennox_speaks_out_against_israeli_>Annie 
Lennox and 
<http://www.nme.com/news/brian-eno/41904>Brian 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/eno01022009.html>Eno 
spoke out against the 2008-9 Israel slaughter of 
over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza and, more 
recently, Rage Against The Machine's 
<http://samuelnichols.blogspot.com/2010/06/rage-against-machine-denounces-israeli.html>Alex 
de la Rocha condemned Israel's Gaza blockade 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jun/07/rage-against-the-machine-review>on 
stage during a concert in London. This past 
Saturday, July 10, for the first time in five 
years, Pink Floyd's 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/17386/179757>David 
Gilmour and 
<http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/06/roger-waters-to-israel-tear-down-the-wall/>Roger 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4649.shtml>Waters 
teamed up to 
<http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38207130/ns/today-entertainment/>perform 
at a <http://www.hopingfoundation.org/>HOPING 
Foundation benefit, which 
<http://mycatbirdseat.com/2010/07/pink-floyd-unite-for-a-palestine-benefit-concert-in-england/>raised 
?350,000 (over $538,000) for Palestinian children 
living in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, 
Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The organization was 
co-founded by fashion designer (and Siggy's 
great-granddaughter) 
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/5254030.stm>Bell 
Freud in 2003.

Megastars Dustin Hoffman and Meg Ryan 
<http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Entertainment/Article.aspx?ID=180671>canceled 
their attendance at this year's annual Jerusalem 
Film Festival the day after Israel's bloody raid 
on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and recent 
performances by 
<http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/06/israel-pixies-cancel-israel-concert-and-other-flotilla-fallout.html>The 
Pixies, Elvis Costello, Gorillaz Sound System, 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/klaxons-and-gorillaz-sound-system-cancel-israel-shows-apparently-due-to-gaza-flotilla-raid-1.294191>The 
Klaxons, 
<http://www.jewlicious.com/2010/06/cultural-boycott-recent-cancellations-by-international-musicians-spur-debate-in-israeli-public/>Devendra 
Banhart, 
<http://palestinenote.com/cs/blogs/news/archive/2010/07/01/hits-and-misses-which-musicians-are-boycotting-israel.aspx>Gil 
Scott Heron, and Snoop Dogg were also 
<http://www.forward.com/articles/128185/>canceled 
for similar ? if not identical ? reasons.

All of these well-heeled celebrities should take 
their courageous 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9515.shtml>boycott 
of Israeli apartheid and aggression even further 
by funding more humanitarian aid ships. With 
their help, supplementing the support of small 
donors, the 
<http://gazaflotilla.delegitimize.com/factsheets/the-gaza-siege/>illegal 
blockade can indeed be broken.

The Israeli policy of 
<http://gazaflotilla.delegitimize.com/factsheets/humanitarian-crisis-in-the-gaza-strip-faq/>brutal 
blockade is clear. In 2006, after Palestinians 
democratically elected Hamas to the shock and 
chagrin of both Israel and the US (who had 
insisted on the elections in the first place), an 
economic and commercial siege was put into place 
by Israel as a 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/16/israel>punishment 
for Palestinian self-determination. As Dov 
Weisglass, adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister 
Ehud Olmert, 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/levy02202006.html>jokingly 
declared, "It's like an appointment with a 
dietitian. The Palestinians in Gaza will get a lot thinner, but won't die."

Collective punishment, via forced deprivation and 
near-starvation, is unequivocally illegal. 
International law is quite clear in this regard. 
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which 
has governed Israel's occupation of the West Bank 
and Gaza since 1967 (and has been repeatedly 
affirmed by both the UN Security Council and General Assembly), states plainly:

"No protected person may be punished for an 
offence he or she has not personally committed. 
Collective penalties and likewise all measures of 
intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."

Furthermore, though the Israeli intention may not 
have been to kill Palestinians in Gaza via food 
and medicine shortages, they have more than made 
up for it with their subsequent use of bombs, 
missiles, tank shells, bullets, depleted uranium, 
flechettes, white phosphorous, and DIME weaponry.

Still, Israeli officials such as former-Prime 
Minster, now Defense Minister, Ehud Barak and 
Director-General of the Foreign Ministry, Yossi 
Gal, 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-gaza-aid-convoy-can-unload-cargo-in-ashdod-for-inspection-1.292560>continue 
to claim that "there is no shortage in 
humanitarian aid to Gaza, as food, fuel and 
supplies are regularly transferred into Gaza by international organizations."

No mention is made of the fact that all building 
material, such as cement, plaster and dry wall, 
is banned from entering Gaza, in 
<http://gazaflotilla.delegitimize.com/factsheets/humanitarian-crisis-in-the-gaza-strip-faq/>addition 
to the absurd 
<http://www.economist.com/node/16264970>prohibition 
of so-called "dual use" medicines, rope, wood, 
razors, light bulbs, textiles and fabrics, sewing 
and hypodermic needles, sewing machines, candles, 
matches, mattresses, bedsheets, pillowcases, 
blankets, cutlery, books, newspapers, coffee, 
tea, cigarettes, clothing, shoes, pencils and 
paper, fresh meat, seeds, nuts, cilantro, sage, 
cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, cumin, vinegar, 
biscuits, candy, potato chips, jam, chocolate, 
french fries, canned or dried fruit, notebooks, 
empty flowerpots, fishing rods or line, 
livestock, musical instruments, and children's toys.

Obviously, Israeli officials take no note of the 
findings of the Food and Agriculture Organization 
of the UN which has reported that 
<http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/47d4e277b48d9d3685256ddc00612265/9a265f2a909e9a1d8525772e004fc34b?OpenDocument>61% 
of Gazans are "food insecure," of which 
"<http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/47d4e277b48d9d3685256ddc00612265/9a265f2a909e9a1d8525772e004fc34b?OpenDocument>65% 
are children under 18 years;" the level of anemia 
in infants is as high as 65.5%, about 70% of 
Gazans live on less than $1 a day, 75% rely on 
food aid, and 60% have no daily access to water.

As Rebecca Sargent of the Peace and Collaborative 
Development Network 
<http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/profiles/blogs/freedom-flotilla-and-israeli?xg_source=activity>notes, 
"Much of the population remains unemployed and 
thus have no money to buy supplies for 
themselves. The 
<http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/sc9567.doc.htm>UN 
resolution 1860 calls for the unfettered access 
of aid and commercial goods to Gaza, although it 
would appear this call has been mostly ignored by 
the Israeli government's blockade."

Also, as of the end of 2009, a 
<http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33334&Cr=gaza&Cr1>U.N. 
report found that "insufficient food and medicine 
is reaching Gazans, producing a further 
deterioration of the mental and physical health 
of the entire civilian population since Israel 
launched Operation Cast Lead against the 
territory," and also "blamed the blockade for 
continued breakdowns of the electricity and 
sanitation systems due to the Israeli refusal to 
let spare parts needed for repair get through the 
crossings." Since 
<http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=89302>June 
2007, "the number of Palestine refugees unable to 
access food and lacking the means to purchase 
even the most basic items, such as soap, school 
stationery and safe drinking water, has tripled" 
and over 80 UN and aid agencies 
<http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/gaza_agriculture_25_05_2010_press_release_english.pdf>agree 
that "the formal economy in Gaza has collapsed."

On May 31, the six-ship Gaza Freedom Flotilla was 
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/33719681/IHH-report-on-the-Freedom-Flotilla>lethally 
attacked in international waters (the ships had 
no intention of sailing through Israeli 
territory) about 80 miles (130 kilometers) off 
the Gaza coast in an early morning raid by elite 
Israeli commandos. The attack was conducted after 
Israel cut off all communications from the ships 
and 
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37442104/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/>surrounded 
the flotilla with over 20 naval vessels and 
warships, along with multiple helicopters. In 
addition to the 45 highly-trained and 
heavily-armed 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/01/gaza-flotilla-eyewitness-accounts-gunfire>commandos 
who rappelled onto the largest ship, the 
Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, murdering at least 
9 civilians and wounding about 60 more, about 650 
other Israeli troops, including surveillance and 
support troops alongside those who actually 
boarded the ships, took part in the illegal assault on the flotilla.

The Mavi Marmara carried 10,000 tons of 
humanitarian aid on board including 6,000 tons of 
cement, more than 2,000 tons of iron, 100 
prefabricated houses, 500 wheelchairs, crutches, 
medical equipment, wood and glass for building, 
electric generators, water purifiers, a mobile 
dental care facility, and food and had even been 
<http://http//blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2010/06/01/evidence-belies-israeli-claim>confirmed 
not to be transporting any weaponry by authorities before its departure.

Another aid ship, the 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2010/06/a-look-at-the-mv-rachel-corrie.html>MV 
Rachel Corrie, carrying 550 tons of cement, 20 
tons of paper for printing school books, 25 tons 
of school supplies, 12 tons of sports equipment 
and 150 tons of medical supplies, was also 
<http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/05/the_legal_posit.html>illegally 
<http://firedoglake.com/2010/06/05/mv-rachel-corrie-seized-passengers-kidnapped-by-israel/>seized 
by the Israeli Navy a few days later.

On June 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 
Netanyahu announced an "easing" of the 
four-year-long Gaza siege, 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/netanyahu-to-human-rights-activists-sail-to-tehran-not-gaza-1.297914>declaring, 
"Today, after we lifted the civilian blockade of 
Gaza there is no reason or justification for further flotillas."

Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz 
<http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/government-approves-plan-to-dramatically-ease-gaza-blockade-1.297327>reports 
that "The highlight of the new policy is to be 
the creation and distribution of a detailed 
'black list' of goods that will not be permitted 
into the Gaza Strip," continuing that, now, "Only 
weapons or 'dual-use' materials that could be 
used to manufacture weapons will be on the list. 
Any item not on the list will be permitted into Gaza."

As a result of this new policy, items such as 
<http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90777/90854/7035660.html>car 
parts, agricultural and fishing tools, cosmetics, 
perfumes, 
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=177943>soda, 
juice, jam, spices, shaving cream, potato chips, 
cookies and candy are now being imported into Gaza.

Nevertheless, the siege has 
<http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0621/breaking30.html>not 
ended. Even though coriander, chocolate, and 
Coca-Cola are now allowed through Israel's 
military checkpoints, goods such as cement, 
steel, iron, fertilizers, gas tanks, drilling 
equipment and water disinfectant are still 
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioi_0jtO9RjMwPNRoXNCndRPRq3gD9GP6FNO0>prohibited. 
In fact, The Los Angeles Times 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/06/world/la-fg-israel-gaza-20100706>reveals 
that "the new list of banned and restricted 
items, which fills several hundred pages, still 
includes goods and supplies vital to Gaza's economic recovery."

Consequently, Karin Laub of Associated Press 
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioi_0jtO9RjMwPNRoXNCndRPRq3gD9GP6FNO0>reports 
that "because Israel will continue to ban most 
travel and exports and restrict the import of 
desperately needed construction materials, the 
new rules are unlikely to restore the territory's 
devastated economy or allow rebuilding of all 
that was destroyed in last year's war [sic]."

In short, Israel's ongoing 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11357.shtml>crime 
against humanity in Gaza continues. As long as 
Israel maintains its military control of Gaza's 
economy, land and sea borders, airspace, 
restricts (or outright denies) the freedom of 
movement of its 1.5 million imprisoned 
inhabitants, and continues murdering Palestinians 
with Apache helicopters, F-15 and F-16 bombers, 
unmanned drones and 
<http://counterpunch.org/cook07132010.html>remote-controlled 
machine guns, Gaza will not be free.

If the 
<http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israel-weighs-responses-to-barrage-of-international-criticism-1.301562>negative 
international attention Israel received after the 
Mavi Marmara massacre led to the so-called 
"<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37442104/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/>easing" 
of the Gaza siege, there's no telling what a 
constant barrage of boats might do. Therefore, 
until this collective punishment of innocent 
civilians ceases completely and Israel is 
<http://www.salon.com/news/israel/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/07/09/israel_gets_away>held 
accountable for its crimes, more boats must 
continue to sail to Gaza. Among those boats 
should be a massive American contingent, funded 
by bold and steadfast believers in 
self-determination, human rights, and 
international law. We have paid for the Israeli 
oppression of Palestine for so long with our tax 
dollars, it's now time to fight for Palestinian 
freedom with our tax-exempt donations.

And so, to all you stars of summer blockbusters 
and sold-out stadiums, start giving generously so 
that a fleet of blockade-busting boats can start their engines.




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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 27 12:42:59 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:42:59 -0700
Subject: [News] Israel demolishes entire Bedouin village
Message-ID: <mailman.145.1280248988.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Israel demolishes Bedouin village

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/07/2010727133151458970.html
Tuesday, July 27, 2010


Israeli authorities have demolished the homes of about 300 Bedouins 
in a village in the southern Negev desert.

The entire village of al-Arakib was bulldozed on Tuesday, with many 
of the former residents' cattle, trees and belongings lost.

Al-Arakib, which had about 40 homes, is one of 45 Bedouin villages 
not recognised by Israeli authorities.

Haia Noach, director of the Negev Co-existence Forum, was present at 
al-Arakib during the demolition and said that at least five Israeli 
bulldozers arrived around 5:30am (0230GMT).

"It took them about three or four hours to destroy all the houses," 
she said, describing the scene as "appalling."

Scuffles erupted as the villagers and around 150 rights activists 
tried to stop the police from carrying out the demolitions, with 
several people wounded and a handful arrested, activists said.

Speaking from a town near Beersheba, Noach said that many of the 
residents had moved to a nearby graveyard to find shade.

Evacuation notice

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld confirmed the early-morning 
operation, saying the homes had been "illegally built" and were 
destroyed in line with a court ruling issued 11 years ago which was 
never implemented.

"Around 30 shacks were removed and several hundred people were taken 
back to the Rahat area where they originally came from," he said, 
referring to a nearby Bedouin town in Israel's arid south.

He said three people had been detained for questioning but were later 
released without charge.

Noach said Israeli authorities had first given residents of al-Arakib 
a notice to evacaute on June 15, but that no action had followed, so 
the residents began to doubt that the demolition would occur.

But this morning, Israeli police arrived and forced residents to 
leave their homes within minutes, Noach said.

The demolition team destroyed water tanks and removed generators.

"It's like a declaration of war. They don't want you here," Noach 
said. "It's unthinkable."

The residents are now waiting for aid and will probably set up 
makeshift tents and facilities on the scene, Noach said.

According to the 
<http://www.dukium.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=2>Negev 
Co-existence Forum,around half of the 155,000 Bedouins in the Negev - 
all of whom are Israeli citizens - live in villages that are 
unrecognised by the government, without municipal services like water 
and electricity.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 27 12:46:34 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:46:34 -0700
Subject: [News] Gaza children shelled with flechette bombs
Message-ID: <mailman.148.1280249203.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Gaza children shelled with flechette bombs

Adie Mormech writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from 
Palestine, 27 July 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11423.shtml



"She came in through the front door and it wasn't clear she was 
injured. Suddenly a lot of blood came from her nose and she vomited, 
all of the family saw this -- her little brothers were very scared. 
She had just been playing in the front of the house."

That is how Nihed al-Massry describes what happened to her daughter, 
nine-year-old Samah Eid al-Massry, after the Israeli army reportedly 
shelled and fired four bombs into and around a residential area in 
Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, on 21 July. Samah is now being 
hospitalized in serious condition, suffering from extensive blood 
loss and very low haemoglobin. She was hit by shrapnel and flechettes 
from a nail bomb that landed 100 meters away, causing internal 
bleeding to the chest and severe head trauma. Nails are now embedded 
throughout her body.

Shells containing flechettes are illegal under international law if 
fired into densely-populated civilian areas. Three other children 
were wounded in the attack.

Two young men were killed; Muhammad al-Kafarneh, 23, suffered severe 
shrapnel injuries to the back and chest and Kasim al-Shinbary, 19, 
was wounded by nails embedded in his skull and shrapnel his back. It 
was unclear earlier whether they were resistance fighters or if they 
were civilians.

Haitham Thaer Qasem, a four-year-old boy and an only child, was 
asleep on a hospital bed, occasionally gasping for breath through the 
apparatus around his nose. He had suffered deep nasal trauma, and 
flechette darts from the bomb were still embedded in his tiny body, 
through his back, right elbow and right leg. He was 200 meters from 
the impact of the bomb.

Haitham's mother was standing off to the side, quietly crying while 
one of his aunts at his bedside explained what happened.

"We had asked Haitham to get shopping for [his mother] from the 
market, then we heard the bombings and somebody came to our home and 
told our family that he was in the hospital and was injured in the 
bombing. We came quickly to the hospital."

Meanwhile, Samah's doctor explained that the girl's blood loss was a 
major concern. Her injuries are exacerbated by the fact that she, 
like three of her brothers, already suffers from the blood condition 
thalassemia and the drug to treat the condition, Exjade, is scarce 
because of the Israeli blockade. She was clearly in pain and 
confused, trying to remove the nasal tubes. Her mother showed us the 
bandages on her chest.

Her doctor, Muhammad Abu Hassan, described her situation as "semi-critical."

"She was in very bad condition when she arrived -- it's difficult for 
children and very traumatic to insert a chest tube for small children 
-- very painful. Blood was mainly coming from the chest. We will have 
to perform surgery and we will further explore her abdominal pain," 
he explained.

The al-Massry family has been affected by Israeli attacks before. 
Samah's four-year-old brother Ryad was injured during Israel's three 
weeks of attacks on the Gaza Strip during winter 2008-09 when more 
than 400 Palestinian children were killed.

"Our house was hit during the war, a neighbor was killed inside and 
our son suffered severe head injuries. He wasn't cared for and 
because of this his sight is now permanently damaged."

As we left Samah, she had begun to cry, moaning in serious discomfort 
and confusion. There were two more injured children in the hospital 
from the attack, also from the al-Massry family in Beit Hanoun: Azzam 
Muhammad al-Massry, 11, who suffered a severely fractured left elbow 
and Ibrahim Wasseem al-Massry, 4, with light injuries to his abdomen.

The previous week in Gaza, Nema Abu Said, a 33-year-old mother of 
five, was <http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11419.shtml>killed 
by Israeli shelling as she went outside frantically looking for her 
youngest son after a previous round of shelling. Three more family 
members were injured by the flechette shells, many of the darts 
remaining permanently embedded in their bodies.

Adie Mormech is a human rights advocate based in the Gaza Strip who 
was previously abducted by the Israeli navy from the eighth Free Gaza 
Movement boat, the Spirit of Humanity. He volunteers with the 
International Solidarity Movement.



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 28 11:25:47 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:25:47 -0700
Subject: [News] Guam resists expansion of US Colonial Military Bases
Message-ID: <mailman.2.1280330776.12139.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



US Military Bases on Guam in Global Perspective  1

Catherine Lutz
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Catherine-Lutz/3389


The island of Guam is a most remarkable place of 
cultural distinctiveness and resourcefulness and 
of great physical beauty.  The Chamorro people 
who have lived here for 4000 years also have an 
historical experience with colonialism and 
military occupation more long-lived and 
geographically intensive, acre for acre, than 
anywhere else in the Pacific and perhaps even in 
global comparative scale (Aguon 2006).  It is 
today embroiled in a debate over when, how, or if 
the United States military will acquire more land 
for its purposes and make more intensive use of the island as a whole.

This military expansion has been planned in 
Washington, with acquiescence and funding from 
Tokyo, in order to relocate some 8,000 Marines 
and 9,000 dependents from Okinawa, as well as US 
Navy, Army, and Air Force assets and operations 
to Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern 
Marianas (CNMI) (Erickson and Mikolay 2006).  The 
plans are breathtaking in scope, including 
removal of 71 acres of coral reef from Apra 
Harbor to allow the entry and berthing of nuclear 
aircraft carriers, the acquisition of land 
including the oldest and revered Chamorro village 
on the island at Pagat for a live-fire training 
range, and an estimated 47 percent increase in 
the island?s population, already past its 
water-supply carrying capacity. The military 
expansion is being planned with one-third of the 
island already in military hands and a 
substantial historical legacy of environmental 
contamination and depletion, external political 
control, and other problems brought by the existing military presence.

Pushback has been substantial, something that is 
particularly remarkable in a context in which 
many islanders consider themselves very loyal and 
patriotic Americans and many have military 
paychecks or pensions as soldiers, veterans, or 
contract workers (Diaz 2001).  Dissent among a 
variety of Guam?s social sectors rose 
dramatically with the appearance of a draft 
Environmental Impact Statement in November 2009 
which first made clear how extensive Washington?s 
plans for the island were (Natividad and Kirk 
2010).  It rose, as well, when it became clear 
that Guam?s political leaders and citizens were 
to be simply informed of those plans, rather than 
consulted or asked permission for the various 
uses.  That dissent received support from 
movements against simultaneous US base expansion 
plans in Okinawa and South Korea, as well as from 
the US EPA response to the draft EIS, which found 
it deeply inadequate as a fair and clear 
assessment of the environmental costs of the 
military?s desires.  The Final EIS, just released 
at the end of July, puts the aircraft carrier 
berthing plan on hold and draws out the buildup 
timeline to lower the population growth rate, but 
otherwise retains its scale and scope. A 
<http://www.kuam.com/Global/story.asp?S=12857970>demonstration 
at a sacred site at Pagat on July 23, 2010 
provided the most potent symbolic expression of resistance to the base plan.

My first exposure to Guam was in 1977, when I 
made a very brief stay over on my way to Ifalik 
atoll in the Federated States of Micronesia (then 
still a UN Trust Territory) for ethnographic 
fieldwork that was part of my graduate training 
as an anthropologist.  My miseducation up to that 
point had been profound:  I could come to that 
nation of islands without having first learned ? 
through many years of education in US schools 
?  the hard facts about the colonial status of 
the area to which I was coming.  My 
anthropological training back then focused, as 
most such programs did, on the beauty of 
indigenous ideas and rituals, of kinship systems 
and healing practices.  However helpful attention 
to such things was toward the goal of a humane 
and anti-racist understanding of the world, the 
cultural worlds that anthropology had tried to 
document were treated as if they occurred in a 
vacuum, outside of the influence of powerful 
economic and political forces and outside of history.

My miseducation led me to be surprised when my 
initial permission to travel to Ifalik was 
granted not by Chamorros and Carolinians, but by 
US bureaucrats, then operating as Trust Territory 
officials.  I only then came to realize what this 
all actually meant ? that Ifalik, like Guam, has 
had an deeply colonial history, and that the 
lives the people there have led were in some ways 
of their own creative making and in other ways 
they were the result of choices by people in 
other remote locations, most recently in Tokyo and Washington, DC.

Such is no less true now than it was in 1950 or 
1977.  It is the reason the people of Guam today 
wait to hear exactly how many more acres of their 
land will be taken for military purposes, how 
many tens of thousands of new people and new 
vehicles will be visited on the island, how many 
over flights and aircraft carrier visits, and 
toxic trickles or spills will be visited upon 
them. It is why they wait, not for rent payments 
for the land, but to hear whether there will be 
some US federal dollars allocated to cover some 
percentage of the externalized costs of the 
increased tempo of military operations on the 
island. That is Guam?s colonial history and 
colonial situation.  It is colonial even as many 
of Guam?s residents take their US citizenship 
seriously and want to make claims to full 
citizenship on the foundation of the limited 
citizenship they now have.  It is colonial even 
as Guam?s many military members ? those born on 
Guam and those born in the 50 United States ? can 
and do see themselves as doing their duty to the 
US civilian leadership who deploy them to bases 
here and around the world.  It is colonial even 
as many of Guam?s citizens have been acting in 
the faith that they should be able to make and 
are making their own choices about whether Guam 
becomes even more of a battleship or not.  But 
social science will call it nothing more than 
colonial when a people have not historically 
chosen their most powerful leaders and have been 
told to background their own national identity in 
favor of that of the power which has ultimate 
rule.  The US presence in Guam is properly called 
imperial because the US is an empire in the 
strict sense of the term as used by historians 
and other social analysts of political forms.

Besides colonialism, another concept relevant to 
Guam?s situation is militarization.  It refers to 
an increase in labor and resources allocated to 
military purposes and the shaping of other 
institutions in synchrony with military 
goals.  It involves a shift in societal beliefs 
and values in ways that legitimate the use of 
force (Ferguson 2009).  It helps describe the 
process by which 14 year olds are in uniform and 
carrying proxy rifles in JROTC units in all of 
Guam?s schools, why a fifth to a quarter of high 
school graduates enter the military, and why the 
identity of the island has over time shifted from 
a land of farmers to a land of war survivors to a 
land of loyal Americans to a land that is, 
proudly, ?the Tip of the Spear,? that is, a land 
that is a weapon.  This historical change ? the 
process of militarization or military 
colonization ? has been visible to some, but more often, hidden in plain sight.

US global military basing system

Guam?s military bases are part of the expansive 
US military basing system around the world and on 
the US mainland.  That system is vast in scale 
and impact and has a particular if contentious 
rationale.  It is important to examine what it 
means to live next to military facilities for several reasons:

(1) To study them with the tools of anthropology 
and the perspective of social science allows us 
to question the common sense about them and to see invisible processes.

(2) Like most social phenomena, bases are often 
hidden in plain sight.  They are normalized from 
day to day, but are partially denormalized when 
they grow or shrink.  Even then, much remains 
invisible and accepted as the natural order of things.

(3) Like social phenomena in which power is 
involved, their effects can be systematically 
hidden by advertising, fear, and public relations work.

Military base communities are in many ways as 
distinctive sociologically and anthropologically 
as the military bases they sit next to, because 
they respond in almost every way to the presence 
of those bases.  They are not simply independent 
neighbors, but over time become conjoined, 
although one is always much more powerful than the other.

Officially, as of late 2008 (the last date for 
which the DoD has made such data public) over 
150,000 troops and 95,000 civilian employees are 
massed in 837 US military facilities in 45 
countries and territories, excluding Iraq and 
Afghanistan. There, the US military owns or rents 
720,000 acres of land, and owns, rents or uses 
60,000 buildings and manages structures valued at 
$145 billion. 4742 bases are located in the 
domestic United States. These official numbers 
are quite misleading as to the scale of US 
overseas military basing, however. That is 
because they not only exclude the massive buildup 
of new bases and troop presence in Iraq and 
Afghanistan, but also secret or unacknowledged 
facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places.

Large sums of money are involved in their 
building and operation.  $2 billion in military 
construction money has been expended in only 
three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan 
wars.  Just one facility in Iraq, Balad Air Base, 
houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and 
extends across 16 square miles with an additional 
12 square mile ?security perimeter.?  The Guam 
build-up has been projected to cost between $10 
and $15 billion, with much of that amount in 
contracts going to businesses in the U.S., Japan, 
South Korea, and, less significantly, Guam itself.

These military facilities include sprawling Army 
bases with airfields and McDonalds and schools, 
and small listening posts.  They include 
artillery testing ranges, and berthed aircraft 
carriers. 2  While the bases are literally 
barracks and weapons depots and staging areas for 
war making and ship repair facilities and golf 
courses and basketball courts, they are also 
political claims, spoils of war, arms sales 
showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories 
for cultural (mis)communication, and collections 
of customers for local shops, services, bars, and prostitution.

The environmental, political, and economic impact 
of these bases is enormous. While some people 
benefit from the coming of a base, at least 
temporarily, most communities and many within 
them pay a high price: their farm land taken for 
bases, their bodies attacked by cancers and 
neurological disorders because of military toxic 
exposures, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured 
and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that 
survive on US military and political support 
given as a form of tacit rent for the bases.

The count of US military bases should also 
include the eleven aircraft carriers in the US 
Navy?s fleet, each of which it refers to as ?four 
and a half acres of sovereign US territory.? 
These moveable bases and their land-based 
counterparts are just the most visible part of 
the larger picture of US military presence 
overseas.  This picture of military access 
includes (1) US military training of foreign 
forces, often in conjunction with the provision 
of US weaponry, (2) joint exercises meant to 
enhance US soldiers? exposure to a variety of 
operating environments from jungle to desert to 
urban terrain and interoperability across 
national militaries, and (3) legal arrangements 
made to gain overflight rights and other forms of 
ad hoc use of others? territory as well as to 
preposition military equipment there.  In all of 
these realms, the US is in a class by itself, no 
adversary or ally maintaining anything comparable 
in terms of its scope, depth and global reach.

These three elements come with problems: The 
training programs strengthen the power of 
military forces in relation to other sectors 
within those countries, sometimes with fragile 
democracies. Fully 38 percent of those countries 
with US basing were cited in 2002 for their poor 
human rights record (Lumpe 2002:16). The 
exercises have sometimes been provocative to 
other nations, and in some cases have become the 
pretext for substantial and permanent positioning 
of troops; in recent years, for example, the US 
has run approximately 20 exercises annually on 
Philippine soil.  Recently (July, 2010) announced 
joint US-South Korean military exercises in the 
Yellow Sea, just off the coast of China, have 
produced strong protest from it and arguably will 
lead to increases in its military spending.

The attempt to gain access has also meant 
substantial interference in the affairs of other 
nations: for example, lobbying to change the 
Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, 
respectively, foreign troop basing, US nuclear 
weapons, and a more-than-defensive military in 
the service of US wars, in the case of Japan.  US 
military and civilian officials are joined in 
their efforts by intelligence agents passing as 
businessmen or diplomats; in 2005, the US 
Ambassador to the Philippines created a furor by 
mentioning that the US has 70 agents operating in Mindanao alone.

Given the sensitivity about sovereignty and the 
costs of having the US in their country, 
elaborate bilateral negotiations result in the 
exchange of weapons, cash, and trade privileges 
for overflight and land use rights. Less 
explicitly, but no less importantly, rice import 
levels or immigration rights to the US or 
overlooking human rights abuses have been the 
currency of exchange (Cooley 2008).

Bases are the literal and symbolic anchors, and 
the most visible centerpieces, of the U.S. 
military presence overseas.  To understand where 
those bases are and how they are being used is 
essential for understanding the United States? 
relationship with the rest of the world, the role 
of coercion in it, and its political economic 
complexion.  We can begin by asking why this 
empire of bases was established in the first 
place, how the bases are currently configured 
around the world and how that configuration is changing.

What are bases for?

Foreign military bases have been established 
throughout the history of expanding states and 
warfare. They proliferate where a state has 
imperial ambitions, either through direct control 
of territory or through indirect control over the 
political economy, laws, and foreign policy of 
other places. Whether or not it recognizes itself 
as such, a country can be called an empire when 
it projects substantial power with the aim of 
asserting and maintaining dominance over other 
regions.  Those policies succeed when wealth is 
extracted from peripheral areas, and 
redistributed to the imperial center.  Empires, 
then, have historically been associated with a 
growing gap between the wealth and welfare of the 
powerful center and the regions it dominates. 
Alongside and supporting these goals has often 
been elevated self-regard in the imperial power, 
or a sense of racial, cultural, or social superiority.

The descriptors empire and imperialism have been 
applied to the Romans, Incas, Mongols, Persians, 
Portuguese, Spanish, Ottomans, Dutch, British, 
Germans, Soviets, Chinese, Japanese, and 
Americans, among others. Despite the striking 
differences between each of these cases, each 
used military bases to maintain some forms of 
rule over regions far from their center.  The 
bases eroded the sovereignty of allied states on 
which they were established by treaty; the Roman 
Empire was accomplished not only by conquest, but 
also ?by taking her weaker [but still sovereign] 
neighbors under her wing and protecting them 
against her and their stronger neighbors
 The 
most that Rome asked of them in terms of 
territory was the cessation, here and there, of a 
patch of ground for the plantation of a Roman fortress? (Magdoff et al. 2002).

What have military bases accomplished for these 
empires through history?  Bases are usually 
presented, above all, as having rational, 
strategic purposes; the imperial power claims 
that they provide forward defense for the 
homeland, supply other nations with security, and 
facilitate the control of trade routes and 
resources.  They have been used to protect 
non-economic actors and their agendas as well ? 
missionaries, political operatives, and aid 
workers among them.  Bases have been used to 
control the political and economic life of the 
host nation. Politically, bases serve to 
encourage other governments? endorsement of the 
empire?s military and other foreign policies. 
Corporations and the military itself as an 
organization have a powerful stake in bases? 
continued existence regardless of their strategic value (Johnson 2004).

Alongside their military and economic functions, 
bases have symbolic and psychological 
dimensions.  They are highly visible expressions 
of a nation?s will to status and 
power.  Strategic elites have built bases as a 
visible sign of the nation?s standing, much as 
they have constructed monuments and battleships. 
So, too, contemporary US politicians and the 
public have treated the number of their bases as 
indicators of the nation?s hyperstatus and 
hyperpower.  More darkly, overseas military bases 
can also be seen as symptoms of irrational or 
untethered fears, even paranoia, as they are 
built with the long-term goal of taming a world 
perceived to be out of control.  Empires 
frequently misperceive the world as rife with 
threats and themselves as objects of violent 
hostility from others.  Militaries? interest in 
organizational survival has also contributed to 
the amplification of this fear and imperial 
basing structures as the solution as they ?sell 
themselves? to their populace by exaggerating 
threats, underestimating the costs of basing and 
war itself, as well as understating the obstacles 
facing preemption and belligerence (Van Evera 2001).

As the world economy and its technological 
substructures have changed, so have the roles of 
foreign bases. By 1500, new sailing technologies 
allowed much longer distance voyages, even 
circumnavigational ones, and so empires could 
aspire to long networks of coastal naval bases to 
facilitate the control of sea lanes and trade. 
They were established at distances that would 
allow provisioning the ship, taking on fresh 
fruit that would protect sailors from scurvy, and 
so on.  By the 21st century, technological 
advances have at least theoretically eliminated 
many of the reasons for foreign bases, given the 
possibilities of in transit refueling of jets and 
aircraft carriers, the nuclear powering of 
submarines and battleships, and other advances in 
sea and airlift of military personnel and 
equipment.  Bases have, nevertheless, continued their ineluctable expansion.

States that invest their people?s wealth in 
overseas bases have paid direct as well as 
opportunity costs, whose consequences in the long 
run have usually been collapse of the empire. In 
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, Kennedy notes 
that previous empires which established and 
tenaciously held onto overseas bases inevitably 
saw their wealth and power decay as they chose 
?to devote a large proportion of its total income 
to ?protection,? leaving less for ?productive 
investment,? it is likely to find its economic 
output slowing down, with dire implications for 
its long-term capacity to maintain both its 
citizens? consumption demands and its 
international position? (Kennedy 1987:539).

Nonetheless, U.S. defense officials and scholars 
have continued to argue that bases lead to 
?enhanced national security and successful 
foreign policy? because they provide ?a credible 
capacity to move, employ, and sustain military 
forces abroad,? (Blaker 1990:3) and the ability 
"to impose the will of the United States and its 
coalition partners on any adversaries."  This 
belief helps sustain the US basing structure, 
which far exceeds any the world has seen: this is 
so in terms of its global reach, depth, and cost, 
as well as its impact on geopolitics in all 
regions of the world, particularly the Asia-Pacific.

A short history of US basing

After consolidation of continental dominance, 
there were three periods of expansive global 
ambition in US history beginning in 1898, 1945, 
and 2001. Each is associated with the acquisition 
of significant numbers of new overseas military 
bases. The Spanish-American war resulted in the 
acquisition of a number of colonies, but the US 
basing system was far smaller than that of its 
political and economic peers including many 
European nations as well as Japan.  In the next 
four decades US soldiers were stationed in just 
14 bases, some quite small, in Puerto Rico, Cuba, 
Panama, and the Virgin Islands, but also, 
already, extending across the Pacific to Hawaii, 
Midway, Wake, and Guam, the Philippines, 
Shanghai, two in the Aleutians, American Samoa, 
and Johnston Island (Harkavy 1982). This small 
number was the result in part of a strong 
anti-statist and anti-militarist strain in US 
political culture (Sherry 1995). From the 
perspective of many in the US through the 
inter-war period, to build bases would be to risk 
unwarranted entanglement in others? conflicts.

England had the most during this period, with 
some countries with large militaries and even 
some with expansive ambitions having relatively 
few overseas bases; Germany and the Soviet Union 
had almost none.  But the attempt to acquire such 
bases would be a contributing cause of World War II (Harkavy 1989:5).

 From 14 bases in 1938, by the end of WW II, the 
United States had built or acquired an astounding 
30,000 installations large and small in 
approximately 100 countries. While this number 
contracted significantly, it went on to provide 
the sinews for the rise to global hegemony of the 
United States (Blaker 1990:22).  Certain ideas 
about basing and what it accomplished were to be 
retained from World War II as well, including the 
belief that ?its extensive overseas basing system 
was a legitimate and necessary instrument of U.S. 
power, morally justified and a rightful symbol of 
the U.S. role in the world? (Blaker 1990:28).

Nonetheless, pressure came from Australia, 
France, and England, as well as from Panama, 
Denmark and Iceland, for return of bases in their 
own territory or colonies, and domestically to 
demobilize the twelve million man military (a 
larger military would have been needed to 
maintain the vast basing system). More important 
than the shrinking number of bases, however, was 
the codification of US military access rights 
around the world in a comprehensive set of legal 
documents.  These established security alliances 
with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the 
Middle East and South Asia (CENTO), and Southeast 
Asia (SEATO), and they included bilateral 
arrangements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, 
Australia and New Zealand.  These alliances 
assumed a common security interest between the 
United States and other countries and were the 
charter for US basing in each place.  Status of 
Forces Agreements (SOFAs) were crafted in each 
country to specify what the military could do; 
these usually gave US soldiers broad immunity 
from prosecution for crimes committed and 
environmental damage created.  These agreements 
and subsequent base operations have usually been shrouded in secrecy.

In the United States, the National Security Act 
of 1947, along with a variety of executive 
orders, instituted what can be called a second, 
secret government or the ?national security 
state?, which created the National Security 
Agency, National Security Council, and Central 
Intelligence Agency and gave the US president 
expansive new imperial powers.  From this point 
on, domestic and especially foreign military 
activities and bases were to be heavily masked 
from public oversight (Lens 1987).  Many of those 
unaccountable funds then and now go into use 
overseas, flowing out of US embassies and 
military bases. Including use to interfere in the 
domestic affairs of nations in which it has had 
or desired military access, including attempts to 
influence votes on and change anti-nuclear and 
anti-war provisions in the Constitutions of the 
Pacific nation of Belau and of Japan.

Nonetheless, over the second half of the 20th 
century, the United States was either evicted or 
voluntarily left bases in dozens of countries. 3 
Between 1947 and 1990, the US was asked to leave 
bases in France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, 
Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, 
Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela. 
Popular and political objection to the bases in 
Spain, the Philippines, Greece, and Turkey in the 
1980s enabled those governments to negotiate 
significantly more compensation from the United 
States. Portugal threatened to evict the US from 
important bases in the Azores, unless it ceased 
its support for independence for its African 
colonies, a demand with which the US complied. 4 
In the 1990s and later, the US was sent packing, 
most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, 
Saudi Arabia, Vieques, and Uzbekistan (Simbulan 1985).

At the same time, remarkable numbers of new US 
bases were newly built (241) after 1947 in 
remarkable numbers in the Federal Republic of 
Germany, as well as in Italy, Britain, and Japan 
(Blaker 1990:45).  The defeated Axis powers 
continued to host the most significant numbers of 
US bases: at its height, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations.

As battles become bases, so bases become battles; 
the bases in East Asia acquired in the Spanish 
American War and in World War II, such as Guam, 
Okinawa and the Philippines, became the primary 
sites from which the United States waged war on 
Vietnam.  Without them, the costs and logistical 
obstacles for the US would have been 
immense.  The number of bombing runs over North 
and South Vietnam required tons of bombs to be 
unloaded, for example, at the Naval Station in 
Guam, stored at the Naval Magazine in the 
southern area of the island, and then shipped to 
be loaded onto B-52s at Andersen Air Force Base 
every day during years of the war.  The morale of 
ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it 
was to become through the latter part of the 
1960s, depended on R & R at bases throughout East 
and Southeast Asia which allowed them to leave 
the war zone and be shipped back quickly and 
inexpensively for further fighting (Baker 
2004:76).  In addition to the bases? role in 
fighting these large and overt wars, they 
facilitated the movement of military assets to 
accomplish the over 200 military interventions 
carried out by the US in the course of the Cold War period (Blum 1995).

While speed of deployment is framed as an 
important continued reason for forward basing, 
equally important is that troops could be 
deployed anywhere in the world from US bases 
without having to touch down en route.  In fact, 
US soldiers are being increasingly billeted on US 
territory, including such far-flung areas as 
Guam, which is presently slated for a larger 
buildup for this reason as well as to avoid the 
political and other costs of foreign deployment.

With the will to gain military control of space, 
as well as gather intelligence, the US over time, 
especially in the 1990s, established a large 
number of new military bases to facilitate the 
strategic use of communications and space 
technologies. Military R&D (the Pentagon spent 
over $52 billion in 2005 and employed over 90,000 
scientists) and corporate profits to be made in 
the development and deployment of the resulting 
technologies have been significant factors in the 
growing numbers of technical facilities on 
foreign soil. These include such things as 
missile early-warning radar, signals 
intelligence, space tracking telescopes and laser 
sources, satellite control, downwind air sampling 
monitors, and research facilities for everything 
from weapons testing to meteorology.  Missile 
defense systems and network centric warfare 
increasingly rely on satellite technology and 
drones with associated requirements for ground 
facilities.  These facilities have often been 
established in violation of arms control 
agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty 
meant to limit the militarization of space.

The assumption that US bases served local 
interests in a shared ideological and security 
project dominated into the 1960s: allowing base 
access showed a commitment to fight Communism and 
gratitude for US military assistance. But with 
decolonization and the US war in Vietnam, such 
arguments began to lose their power, and the 
number of US overseas bases declined from an 
early 1960s peak. Where access was once 
automatic, many countries now had increased 
leverage over what the US had to give in exchange 
for basing rights, and those rights could be 
restricted in a variety of important ways, 
including through environmental and other 
regulations. The bargaining chips used by the US 
were increasingly sophisticated weapons, as well 
as rent payments for the land on which bases were 
established. 5  These exchanges were often linked 
with trade and other kinds of agreements, such as 
access to oil and other raw materials and 
investment opportunities (Harkavy 1982:337). They 
also have had destabilizing effects on regional 
arms balances, particularly when advanced 
weaponry is the medium of exchange. From the 
earlier ideological rationale for the bases, 
global post-war recovery and decreasing 
inequality between the US and countries ? mostly 
in the global North ? that housed the majority of 
US bases, led to a more pragmatic or economic 
grounding to basing negotiations, albeit often 
thinly veiled by the language of friendship and 
common ideological bent. The 1980s saw countries 
whose populations and governments had strongly 
opposed US military presence, such as Greece, 
agree to US bases on their soil only because they 
were in need of the cash, and Burma, a neutral 
but very poor state, entered negotiations with 
the US over basing troops there (Harkavy 1989:4-5).

The third period of accelerated imperial ambition 
began in 2000, with the election of George Bush 
and the ascendancy to power of a group of leaders 
committed to a more aggressive and unilateral use 
of military power, their ability to expand the 
scope of US power increased by the attacks of 
9/11. They wanted "a network of 'deployment 
bases' or 'forward operating bases' to increase 
the reach of current and future forces" and 
focused on the need for bases in Iraq. While the 
unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the 
immediate justification, the need for a 
substantial American force presence in the Gulf 
transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam 
Hussein. This plan for expanded US military 
presence around the world has been put into 
action, particularly in the Middle East, the 
Russian perimeter, and, now, Africa.

Pentagon transformation plans result in the 
design of US military bases to operate ever more 
as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which 
to project military capabilities quickly 
anywhere.  Where bases in Korea, for example, 
were once meant primarily to defend South Korea 
from attack from the north, they are now, like 
bases everywhere, project power in many 
directions and serve as stepping stones to 
battles far from themselves.  The Global Defense 
Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, 
focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of 
US bases away from Cold War locations, but on 
grounding imperial ambitions through remaking 
legal arrangements that support expanded military 
activities with other allied countries and 
prepositioning equipment in those countries to be 
able to ?surge? military force quickly, anywhere.

The Department of Defense currently distinguishes 
three types of military facilities. ?Main 
operating bases? are those with permanent 
personnel, strong infrastructure, and often 
including family housing, such as Kadena Air Base 
in Japan and Ramstein Air Force Base in 
Germany.  ?Forward operating sites? are 
?expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a 
limited U.S. military support presence and 
possibly prepositioned equipment,? such as 
Incirlik Air Base in Turkey and Soto Cano Air 
Base in Honduras (US Defense Department 
2004:10).  Finally, ?cooperative security 
locations? are sites with few or no permanent US 
personnel, which are maintained by contractors or 
the host nation for occasional use by the US 
military, and often referred to as ?lily pads.? 
In Thailand, for example, U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy 
Airfield has been used extensively for US combat 
runs over Iraq and Afghanistan. Others are now 
cropping up around the world, especially 
throughout Africa, as in Dakar, Senegal where 
facilities and use rights have been newly established.

Are Guam?s bases domestic or overseas bases? Are 
there racial underpinnings to the differences in how Guam?s basing is handled?

The history just recounted mostly refers to US 
bases on other countries? sovereign soil. Is 
Guam?s situation anomalous?  Is Guam?s Andersen 
AFB a domestic base or a foreign base?  As Guam 
is a US territory, it is neither a fully 
incorporated part of the US nor a free 
nation.  The island?s license plate, which notes 
it is ?Where America?s Day Begins,? also reads, 
?Guam USA.? This expresses the wish of some, 
rather than the reality.  It perhaps would better 
read, Guam, US sort of A.  International legal 
norms make the status clear, however.  Guam is a 
colony, and primarily a military colony, in 
keeping with the idea that the US? imperial 
history, especially in the second half of the 
20th century, has been a military colonialism around the world.

Guam?s status shifts by context, however.  The 
DoDs Base Structure Report places Guam and its 
39,287 ?owned? acres (39 percent of the island?s 
territory) between Georgia (560,799 acres) and 
Hawaii (175,911 acres).  No Status of Forces 
Agreement (SOFA) regulates the US forces on Guam, 
and as far as I know, the DoD does not need to 
report each day to the government of Guam on how 
many soldiers have been brought in or sent out of 
Guam, nor is it negotiating with Guam about its 
plans to grow its bases on Guam.

<http://www.japanfocus.org/data/us_military_bases_on_guam.png>
[]
<http://www.japanfocus.org/data/us_military_bases_on_guam.png>



Map of US military bases on Guam (1991)

One very important and empirical index of the 
degree to which Guam?s bases are foreign or 
domestic is the quality of care that has been 
taken with its environment and health (Castro 
2007).  Overseas bases have repeatedly inflicted 
environmental devastation.  Unexploded ordnance 
killed 21 people in Panama before the US was 
evicted and continues to threaten communities 
nearby.  In Germany, industrial solvents, 
firefighting chemicals, and varieties of waste 
have ruined ecological systems near some US 
bases.  The Koreans are finding extremely high 
levels of military toxins in bases returned to 
them by the US from near the DMZ. Ebeye atoll 
suffers severe water quality and quantity 
problems due to the US military presence (Soroko 2006).

While Guam?s environment has been treated 
carelessly through the years, environmental 
standards have not been high enough for domestic 
US bases either.  Fort Bragg in North Carolina, 
for example, engaged in outdoor burning of very 
large numbers of its unwanted, old wooden 
barracks at one point in the 1970s, and an 
ancient water treatment plant was used on Fort 
Bragg up until quite recently.  One can also 
point to the US Army Corps of Engineers? Formerly 
Used Defense 
<https://environment.usace.army.mil/what_we_do/fuds/>Sites 
whose cleanup would be so expensive that they are 
termed ?national sacrifice zones,? or permanent no man?s lands by some.

But activists have long considered the 
environmental and judicial standards that are 
negotiated into each country?s SOFA as an index 
of how much respect their country is 
accorded.  It is possible to measure the quantity 
of toxins variously introduced into the 
environment of Guam, Germany, the Philippines, 
California, and North Carolina, for example.  The 
broad differences in that quantity roughly occur 
on a scale that appears quite racial, with the US 
mainland at the top, Germany next, and the 
Philippines and Guam at the bottom.  If Guam?s 
political status were truly domestic, we might 
expect Guam to look more like the mainland in 
terms of how the environment has been cared for. It does not.

But the internal racial history of the US itself 
demonstrates that the military base has been a 
booby prize for many of the internally colonized 
in the US as well: the distinction between 
domestic and foreign bases has been blurry on the 
mainland as well.  All domestic military bases 
are in fact, of course, built on Native American 
land, and even after that land was taken, the 
bases were often intentionally sited on land 
inhabited by poor white, black and Indian 
farmers.  Thousands of them lost their land in 
North Carolina alone in the buildup to WW II (Lutz 2001).

And there, too, we can ask, as we ask on Guam, 
who benefited then and who benefits now from base 
building and base buildups?  What costs are 
externalized and borne by others?  And how has a 
rhetoric of national security over all 
contributed to the notion that the military can 
be and should be excepted from environmental protection standards?

The externalized costs of bases

The people of Guam have been engaged in a several 
year exercise of trying to detail the impact of 
military bases in order to gain some relief from 
the expected continuing externalization of the 
physical and social costs of military basing onto 
the people of Guam.  Among the health and 
environmental issues pertaining to base expansion 
are the long term maintenance of roads, the 
stressed and declining water supply, and the likely upswing in crime rates.

In this final section, the economic impact of 
bases is examined, as this has been crucial in 
Guam and elsewhere for the arguments made for 
military expansion.  Obviously the health and 
wellbeing of people affected by military basing 
are crucial, but the economic effects have been 
the primary thing that people in many base 
communities have focused on.  This is so for two 
reasons.  The first is that the military itself 
publicizes its arrival or expansion as an 
economic boon, noting the dollars brought in via 
soldier?s salaries, civilian work on post, and 
construction and other sub-contracts that could 
provide jobs. So the First Hawaiian Bank 
published a Guam Economic Forecast that claimed 
?The military expansion is anticipated to benefit 
Guam?s economy in the amount of $1.5 billion per 
year once the process begins." 6

The second reason for the economic focus is that 
they appear overall to be positive, unlike the 
environmental, sovereignty, cultural, crime, and 
noise effects. But one of the reasons they look 
positive is because the powerful benefit and have 
the resources to convince others that they, too, 
benefit even when they palpably do 
not.  Moreover, the military has large numbers of 
personnel, military and civilian, doing public 
relations work with media and communities to make 
their case for simple economic positives. In 
addition, those locals who are most likely to 
benefit financially have the funding and 
motivation to do similar public relations 
work.  For example, the Chamber of Commerce 
funded a 2008 survey that found that ?71 per cent 
of Guam residents supported an increase in the 
United States military presence, with nearly 80 
per cent of the view that the increasing military 
presence would result in additional jobs and tax 
revenue; according to the poll, 60 per cent felt 
the additional Marines on the island would have a 
positive effect and would ultimately improve the 
island?s quality of life.? 7  This poll was as 
much an attempt to create reality as to reflect 
it. It builds on an existing cultural narrative, 
one that is purchased with media time and power, 
a narrative that says ?you will all benefit.?

What are the economic effects of bases?  Three 
major factors can be identified. First, the 
economic effects are primarily redistributional 
rather than generative (unlike, for example, 
manufacturing or education jobs). Certain sectors 
atrophy and others grow in military districts, 
often in very strong fluctuations. In 2007 in 
Guam, for example, ?While employment in 
manufacturing, transportation and public 
utilities and retail trade decreased, increases 
were seen for jobs in the service sector and 
public sector; with the construction sector 
experiencing the largest increase, that is, 1,450 
jobs, or 35 per cent.? 8  Usually, retail jobs 
are the main type of work created around military 
bases. Unfortunately, those jobs pay less than 
any other category of work, accelerating the 
growth of inequality in military communities.

Second, the military is a highly toxic industrial 
operation and it externalizes many of its costs 
of operation to the communities that host it and 
serve it. These costs include such things as 
environmental waste, PTSD in returning war 
veterans and high rates of domestic violence, 
rapid deterioration of roads and other public 
amenities, and, in many communities, decline in 
human capital development of populations that 
have gone into the military (Lutz and Bartlett 
1995, Lutz 2001). JROTC, for example, only 
appears to add resources to school districts 
while it in fact draws on significant local 
education resources, while serving as recruiting 
devices. The math on these costs ? the 
subtraction from the general welfare and general public funds ? is rarely done.

Finally, military economies are volatile.  While 
the ?war cycle? is different than the business 
cycle, it also has booms and busts.  For example, 
businesses in military personnel cities like 
Fayetteville, North Carolina regularly go under 
when service members are deployed to US war 
zones.  Any major deployment from Guam?s bases 
can be expected to significantly harm local 
enterprise dependent on military 
business.  Moreover, a volatile real estate 
market catering to foreign military personnel 
sends property prices spiralling and forces local 
working families into more substandard housing.

Conclusion

There are legal questions in the Guam military 
buildup as well. In her testimony before the UN 
Committee of 24 in 2008, Sabina Flores Peres 
referred to the extremity of ?the level and 
grossness of the infraction? of the UN Charter by 
the US in its further militarization of the 
island. This is not hyperbole, because Guam?s 
militarization is objectively more extreme in its 
concentration than that found virtually anywhere 
else on earth.  There are only a few other areas 
that are in similar condition ? all, not 
coincidentally islands such as Okinawa, Diego 
Garcia, and, in the past, Vieques, Puerto Rico 
(see e.g., Inoue 2004, Yoshida 2010 and McCaffrey 
2002).  This was the product of an island 
strategy for the US Navy, developed in the face 
of decolonization and anxieties about the fate of 
continental US bases in that context in the 1950s and 1960s (Vine 2009).

Guam, objectively, has the highest ratio of US 
military spending and military hardware and land 
takings from indigenous populations of any place 
on earth.  Here there might have been rivals in 
Diego Garcia or in some areas of the continental 
US if the US had not forcibly removed those 
indigenous landowners altogether or onto the 
equivalent of reservations, something the US had 
hoped to do in Guam as far back as 1945.  The 
level and grossness of the infraction has to do 
with the racial hierarchy that fundamentally 
guides the US in its ?negotiations? with other 
peoples over the siting of its military bases and 
the treatment they are accorded once the US 
settles in.  As the military budget suddenly and 
intensely comes under scrutiny in the United 
States in the summer of 2010 during severe 
economic crisis, the hope must be that the 
project of building yet more military facilities 
on Guam will hit the chopping block.  As a human 
rights issue, however, the US treatment of Guam?s 
people should have no price tag.



Catherine Lutz is the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Family 
Professor in Anthropology and International 
Studies at the Watson Institute for International 
Studies at Brown University.  She is the author 
of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0814752446/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20>The 
Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. 
Military Posts and (with elin o?Hara slavick, 
Carol Mayvor and Howard Zinn), 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/8881586339/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20>Bomb 
after Bomb: A Violent Cartography.

Recommended citation: Catherine Lutz, "US 
Military Bases on Guam in Global Perspective," 
The Asia-Pacific Journal, 30-3-10, July 26, 2010.

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Robert W. and Sweezy, Paul (2002) U.S. Military 
Bases and Empire, The Monthly Review Vol. 53, No. 10.

McCaffrey, Katherine (2002) Military Power and 
Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto 
Rico (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press).

Natividad, LisaLinda and Gwyn Kirk (2010) 
?Fortress Guam: Resistance to US Military 
Mega-Buildup,? The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 10, 
2010, <http://japanfocus.org/-LisaLinda-Natividad/3356/>link.

Sherry, Michael S. (1995) In the Shadow of War: 
The United States Since the 1930?s (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Simbulan, Roland (1985) The Bases of our 
Insecurity: A Study of the U.S. Military Bases in 
the Philippines (Manila, Philippines: BALAI Fellowship).

Soroko, Jennifer (2006) ?Water at the 
intersection of militarization, development, and 
democracy on Kwajalein Atoll, in the Republic of 
the Marshall Islands?. MA thesis, Department of Anthropology, Brown University.

US Defense Department (2004) Strengthening U.S. 
Global Defense Posture, Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.).

Van Evera, Stephen (2001) Militarism (Cambridge, 
MA: MIT). Available [online] 
<http://web.mit.edu/polisci/research/vanevera/militarism.pdf>here. 
Date last accessed July 23, 2010.

Vine, David. (2009) Island of Shame: The Secret 
History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego 
Garcia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yoshida, Kensei (2010) Okinawa and Guam: In the 
Shadow of U.S. and Japanese ?Global Defense 
Posture,? The Asia-Pacific Journal, 
<http://japanfocus.org/-Yoshida-Kensei/3378>link.

Endnotes

1 This paper is an updated and revised version of 
an invited Presidential Lecture given at the 
University of Guam on April 14, 2009.  Portions 
appeared in the Introduction to The Bases of 
Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military 
Posts. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

2 The major concentrations of U.S. sites outside 
those war zones as of 2007 were in South Korea, 
with 106 sites and 29,000 troops, Japan with 130 
sites and 49,000 troops, most concentrated in 
Okinawa, and Germany with 287 sites and 64,000 
troops.  Guam with 28 facilities has nearly 6,600 
airmen and soldiers and is slated to radically 
expand over the next several years (Base Structure Report FY2007).

3 Between 1947 and 1988, the U.S. left 62 
countries, 40 of them outside the Pacific Islands (Blaker 1990:34).

4 Luis Nuno Rodrigues, ?Trading ?Human Rights? 
for ?Base Rights?: Kennedy, Africa and the 
Azores?, Ms. Possession of the author, March 2006.

5 Harkavy (1982:337) calls this the 
?arms-transfer-basing nexus? and sees the U.S. 
weaponry as having been key to maintaining both 
basing access and control over the client states 
in which the bases are located.  Granting basing 
rights is not the only way to acquire advanced 
weaponry, however.  Many countries purchased arms 
from both superpowers during the Cold War, and 
they are less likely to have US bases on their soil.

6 Economic Forecast ? Guam Edition 2006-2007, First Hawaiian Bank, pp. 8-9.

7 <http://www.guampdn.com>Link, 18 February 2008.

8 <http://www.guamdol.net>Link, September 2007, Current Employment Report.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 30 10:54:23 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:54:23 -0700
Subject: [News] Farc slams Colombian government
Message-ID: <mailman.31.1280501870.12139.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Farc slams Colombian government

Friday, July 30, 2010
17:41 Mecca time, 14:41 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/07/20107305313279872.html

Al Jazeera obtained video of Alfonso Cano, the Farc chief, delivering 
a message to Colombia's government

The leader of Colombia's largest rebel group has been seen in a new 
video, criticising the Latin American country's president-elect.

In the video obtained by Al Jazeera, Alfonso Cano, the 
<http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/05/2008615165816702835.html>Revolutionary 
Armed Forces of Colombia(Farc) leader, is shown to be discussing the 
recent presidential elections and government's policies.

"The triumph of [Juan Manuel] Santos on June 20 guarantees the 
continuation of his policies and strategies," Cano, whose real name 
is 
<http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/05/20086150851467563.html>Guillermo 
Saenz Vargas,says in the video dated July 2010.

"He [Santos] has shielded the former government from being taken to 
national or international justice."

Santos, the former defence 
minister,<http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/06/2010620213922101559.html> 
won Colombia's run-offpresidential election last month.

He promised to continue the policies of Alvaro Uribe, the outgoing 
president, who was unable to run for re-election after a 
constitutional court barred him from seeking a third term.

Crucial juncture

Al Jazeera's Teresa Bo said that the release of the video, the 
authenticity of which could not be verified, came at a crucial time 
for the country.

"This is happening only days before the elected president of 
Colombia, Juan Manos Santos, who will succeed president Alvaro Uribe, 
takes office. This is no coincidence," our correspondent said.

"He is also sending a message to Juan Manuel Santos about the future 
and what he should do."

In the video, Cano also said that the new president has merely 
undertaken a task "of rearranging a political regime".

"[This government] is filled with illegitimacy because it has been 
taken over by drug trafficking, by administrative corruption, and impunity."

"The whole electoral apparatus is rotten. It is characterised by 
terrorist violence in a substantial way."

Popular figure

Uribe's two four-year terms in office were marred by scandals over 
corruption and human rights abuses, including arrests of legislators 
for "colluding with death squads" and a probe into state spies 
illegally wiretapping journalists and judges.

But he remains popular for battling the Farc fighters, using billions 
of dollars in US aid to push them away from Colombia's main cities.

The Farc fighters have said that they will keep up their fight 
against the government.

"People can vote for whom the want, but we will continue fighting," 
Commander Duber of Farc told Al Jazeera on the eve of the election.

"The ideology of the Farc is to win or die, that's what Che Guevara said."




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul  1 10:11:03 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:11:03 -0700
Subject: [News] Confrontations in Puerto Rico
Message-ID: <mailman.99.1277993605.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>




IMPORTANT NEWS TO DIVULGE TROUGHOUT THE WORLD.
EXPLOSIVE POLITICAL SITUATION IN PUERTO RICO

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, 
groups of students, teachers and citizens asked 
for entry to the House of the Laws and they were 
struck and tortured by the Police, there are 
numerous injured people, while the National Guard 
is mobilized towards the Capitol Hill. Violent 
shocks scatter for the whole zone of the 
Parliament and the repressions continue.

A constitutional coup has just been established in Puerto Rico.
After a year in which the present time government 
under the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo 
Progresista, that attempts to join the Island to 
the United States trough statehood) tried to and 
succeeded taking over many institutions that form 
the base of the democratic government of Puerto 
Rico, an atmosphere of hostility followed by many 
reckless actions that threaten public peace had 
climaxed in violent and aggressive actions of 
this government against the parties of the 
opposition, the organized student movement, the 
labor unions, the press, the environment, as 
against every area and institution of Puerto Rico?s civil society.

This constitutional coup springs from the 
Legislative branch of the government under the 
command of Senator Thomas Rivera Schatz, endorsed 
by the central government, under the dominance of 
the Secretary Governor, counselor Marcos 
Rodr?guez Ema, with the obvious intent of having 
under their grasp and without opposition full 
control of every agency and organization that 
rule the judiciary, academic, economic and civil 
societies. Before this scenario, Governor Luis 
Fortu?o operates without volition, has no 
opinion, appearance nor public responsibility.

With the complete control of the High Court of 
Puerto Rico, the University of Puerto Rico Board 
of trustees, and the alleged control of the news 
media, among many others, the genuine 
participation of the People of Puerto Rico in all 
democratic processes protected by our Constitution is jeopardized.

The events started (trough the rush approval of 
Law 7 by the Legislature) with more than 20,000 
public employee lay-offs, with the allegation 
that this would alleviate the gigantism of the 
government and would find the solution of the 
serious public deficit, that has never been 
properly evidenced. This decision has caused 
economical chaos, public services are worse than 
ever and it has generated despair and gloominess 
in every Puertorrican family. In this same guise 
there exists a serious persecution against all 
artistic institutions of the country, strangling 
their budgets, trying with this actions to avoid 
the propagation of art as dissidence. This, while 
the government favors contracts of obscene sums 
with hundreds of advisors, contractors and 
lobbyists associated with their own political party.

The attacks continued in the form of the 
appointment to the High Court of four Judges with 
a well known affiliation with, and militancy for 
the governing political party, achieving a 
majority of votes in favor of the actual 
government on all decisions made in this Forum, 
on individual basis. The government went on 
repressing and eliminating student participation 
on the procedures of the State University, 
suppressing tuition exemption rights for 
outstanding athletes and artists, among others; 
forcing the students from all eleven campuses of 
the University of Puerto Rico to declare a strike 
that lasted 60 days, generating ample support 
from the people of Puerto Rico and around the world.

The students on strike were successful on their 
achieving their demands trough negotiations that 
involved a First Instance Court and an appointed 
negotiator; however, these accords were are 
trying to be invalidated by Secretary of 
government Rodr?guez Ema who said that these 
accords ?are not worth the paper in which they were written?

This event preceded the Central government?s 
action of proposing a hasty law, that was signed 
with no revision within hours, adding four 
additional members to the Board of trustees of 
the University of Puerto Rico. These additions to 
the Board are unconditional members of the 
governing political party The students of the 
State university, who on a great majority depend 
in Federal grants, now face an annual recurring 
fee of $800.00, fee they will not be able to pay 
and that they will not pay, forcing the students 
to return to their strike. With this strategy, 
the Central government risk the accreditation of 
the State University and as a consequence, the 
government would be able to privatize it?s assets.

Following this same direction, the government of 
Puerto Rico will attempt to sell and to divide 
for speculation a strip of land where stands the 
Karst formation, on the northwest of the Island. 
This area collects one third of our water 
supplies for the entire population; nonetheless, 
the government intends to put this area into 
private hands that would build a toll expressway 
over this zone that is rich ecologically and economically.

Passing up many other events, the budget of 
Puerto Rico was approved, together with countless 
laws which favor privatization, the dissolving of 
professional associations and the distribution of 
public funds into private hands, without the 
pertaining and compulsory hearings of public 
participation, reaching the extreme of turning 
off the microphones of the opposing political 
party members, in a despotic fashion.

The events climaxed last week when the FBI in 
Puerto Rico arrested Senator H?ctor Mart?nez, 
NPP, on charges of bribe, the selling of 
influences and other charges. Martinez is 
Senator?s Rivera Schatz right hand on the Senate. 
A public squabble reached the news between the 
Senator and the FBI, with the Seantor fending the 
alleged innocence of Senator Mart?nez,, who has 
been directly associated with drug traffic and 
who was filmed while committing bribery.

Then, last in his many violent and reckless acts, 
the president of the Senate, Rivera Schatz, using 
force and a real padlock, censored the access of 
the cameras and the news media to the Senate 
sessions, depriving the People of Puerto Rico of 
direct information about the discussions and 
voting sessions that were taking place about this 
year?s budget and other matter). The events 
resulted in verbal and physical violence between 
senators, rising indignation between the people 
to a point of and almost unsustainable state of outrage and wrath.

Counselor Rivera Schatz has taken virtual control 
of the country with his tyrannical and fascist 
ways; and it cannot be discarded that from these 
same seats, this same week, acts of persecution 
and acts of violence will be started against 
other sectors of the People, all approved by the 
Secretary Governor of Puerto Rico.

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, 
groups of students, teachers and citizens asked 
for entry to the House of the Laws and they were 
struck and tortured by the Police, there are 
numerous injured people, while the National Guard 
is mobilized towards the Capitol Hill. Violent 
shocks scatter for the whole zone of the 
Parliament and the repressions continue.

This factual deed of control of the political 
power from within the Puertorrican Nation 
violates all elementary principles of democracy 
and of participation of the People in the 
government, for which we proclaim to the World 
the actual situation of contained violence that 
exists in our People and that is about to explode 
against these two politicians that had taken by 
assault the power in our Country. Even though in 
Puerto Rico there are no conditions for an armed 
struggle of the People because of the obvious 
disparity of the opposing sides, a revolution of 
cultural and of student affirmation is starting 
to take the streets and to retrieve the spaces 
stolen away by the originators of this coup.

We exhortat all communications media of the World 
to divulge and expose the current situation of 
the Puertorrican Nation and we ask of you, therefore, your total solidarity.

Composed by Roberto Ramos-Perea, Puertorrican Playwriter
(With the active collaboration, comments and 
support of more than a hundred Puertorrican citizens.)



Luis Barrios, Ph.D., BCFE
Chair & Professor
Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies
Joh Jay College of Criminal Justice-City University of New York
445 West 59 Street, Room 4115-N
New York, New York 10019
Office: (212) 237-8747
FAX: (212) 237-8664
Email: lbarrios at jjay.cuny.edu
Web Page: www.jjay.cuny.edu

Para m? ser comunista no es militar en un 
partido; para m? ser comunista es tener una 
actitud ante la vida. Hayd?e Santamar?a

I believe that there will ultimately be a clash 
between the oppressed and those that do the 
oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash 
between those who want freedom, justice and 
equality for everyone and those who want to 
continue the systems of exploitation. Malcolm X

Education either functions as an instrument which 
is used to facilitate integration of the younger 
generation into the logic of the present system 
and bring about conformity or it becomes the 
practice of freedom, the means by which men and 
women deal critically and creatively with reality 
and discover how to participate in the 
transformation of their world. Paulo Freire


From: <mailto:lbarrios at jjay.cuny.edu>Luis Barrios
To: virtin red informativa internacional

URGENTE. URGENTE. URGENTE.
PARA DIFUSI?N INMEDIATA.
NOTICIA PARA EL MUNDO.

LA EXPLOSIVA SITUACI?N POL?TICA
  DE PUERTO RICO

Son las 5:00 de la tarde del d?a 30 de junio de 
2010, grupos de estudiantes, profesores y 
ciudadanos pidieron entrada a la Casa de las 
Leyes y fueron golpeados y torturados por la 
Pol?cia, hay numerosos heridos, mientras se 
moviliza la Guardia Nacional hacia el Capitolio. 
Choques violentos se esparcen por toda la zona 
del Parlamento y las represiones contin?an.

Un golpe de estado constitucional acaba de consolidarse en Puerto Rico.
Tras un a?o de que el actual gobierno del Partido 
Nuevo Progresista (PNP, partido que busca la 
anexi?n de Puerto Rico a los Estados Unidos), 
intentara y lograra exitosamente la toma de 
varias instituciones que sostienen el gobierno 
democr?tico de Puerto Rico, un ambiente de 
hostilidad seguido por temerarias acciones 
retadoras de la paz p?blica, han desembocado en 
acciones violentas y agresivas del actual 
gobierno, tanto contra los partidos de oposici?n, 
como del movimiento estudiantil organizado, los 
sindicatos, la prensa, as? como de todos los 
sectores de la sociedad civil puertorrique?a.
Esta toma del control constitucional procede de 
la Rama Legislativa bajo la autoridad del Senador 
Lcdo.Thomas Rivera Schatz, apoyada por el 
gobierno central bajo el mando del Secretario de 
la Gobernaci?n, el Lcdo. Marcos Rodr?guez Ema, 
con el obvio prop?sito de tener a su disposici?n 
y sin disputa, el control de todos los organismos 
rectores judiciales, universitarios, econ?micos y 
civiles. Ante este panorama, el actual 
Gobernador, Lcdo. Luis Fortu?o, funciona sin 
voluntad, sin opini?n y sin presencia ni responsabilidad p?blica.
Con el control del Tribunal Supremo de Puerto 
Rico, la Junta de S?ndicos de la Universidad de 
Puerto Rico, el pretendido control de los medios 
de comunicaci?n, entre muchos otros, se atenta 
contra la genuina participaci?n del pueblo 
puertorrique?o en todos los procesos democr?ticos 
protegidos por su Carta de Derechos.
Los incidentes comenzaron con el despido de m?s 
20,000 empleados p?blicos con el pretexto de 
aliviar el gigantismo gubernamental y resolver el 
grav?simo d?ficit fiscal del pa?s. Esta decisi?n 
ha provocado el caos econ?mico, ha empeorado la 
prestaci?n de servicios p?blicos y ha provocado 
la desesperanza en todas las familias 
puertorrique?as. De la misma forma se instaur? 
una grave persecuci?n contra los institutos 
art?sticos del pa?s, estrangulando sus 
presupuestos y de esta manera evitar la 
propagaci?n del arte como disidencia. Mientras el 
Gobierno favorec?a con contratos de cantidades 
obscenas, a cientos de asesores, contratistas, y 
cabilderos asociados a su partido.
Continuaron los ataques con el nombramiento al 
Tribunal Supremo de cuatro Jueces afiliados y 
militantes al partido del poder logrando con ello 
la mayor?a a favor del gobierno de todas las 
decisiones que por votaci?n individual se 
hicieran en ese foro. Luego continu? con la 
eliminaci?n y represi?n de la participaci?n 
estudiantil en los procesos universitarios, la 
supresi?n de derechos de exenci?n de matricula de 
atletas, artistas, entre otros, mientras oblig? a 
los estudiantes de los 11 recintos universitarios 
del estado a declarar una Huelga que dur? 60 
d?as. Los estudiantes en Huelga lograron negociar 
a trav?s de un tribunal de primera instancia, sin 
embargo, los referidos compromisos fueron 
invalidados por el Secretario de la Gobernaci?n 
quien dijo que los acuerdos ?no valen el papel en que est?n escritos?.
Este hecho precedi? a la acci?n del gobierno 
central y del Senado de proponer un proyecto de 
Ley, aprobado en cuesti?n de horas, para aumentar 
cuatro miembros m?s a la Junta de S?ndicos. 
Dichos miembros son incondicionales del partido 
en el poder. Los estudiantes universitarios de la 
universidad del estado, cuya vasta mayor?a 
dependen de la beca de estudios federal, se 
enfrentan a una cuota anual recurrente de $800 
d?lares. Cuota que no pueden pagar y que se 
negar?n a pagar obligados nuevamente a la 
consecuente Huelga. De esta manera, la 
administraci?n central de la UPR arriesga la 
acreditaci?n de la Universidad y podr? privatizar 
sus activos. En esta misma direcci?n, el Gobierno 
de Puerto Rico vender? los terrenos donde se 
ubica la zona del llamado ?Karso? del Noroeste, 
que recoge un tercio de los abastos de agua de 
todo el pa?s, para entregarlo a manos privadas 
que construir?n un expreso de peaje sobre la 
referida zona, rica ecol?gicamente.
Pasando por alto muchos otros acontecimientos, el 
Presupuesto del pa?s fue aprobado, junto con 
innumerables leyes que favorecen la 
privatizaci?n, la descolegiaci?n profesional, as? 
como la repartici?n de fondos p?blicos a manos 
privadas sin tomar en cuenta las necesarias y 
obligadas vistas p?blicas de participaci?n 
ciudadana, y apagando los micr?fonos de las 
bancas del Partido de Oposici?n de manera desp?tica.
Los incidentes lograron un punto clim?tico cuando 
esta pasada semana, el FBI (Federal Bureau of 
Investigation de los Estados Unidos) arresta por 
cargos de soborno, venta de influencias y otros a 
un senador del PNP, el senador H?ctor Mart?nez, 
mano derecha del Senador Rivera Schatz. Una pugna 
p?blica salta a las noticias entre Rivera Schatz 
y este cuerpo federal castrense, en defensa de la 
supuesta inocencia del senador Mart?nez, quien ha 
sido asociado al narcotr?fico y quien fuera 
grabado en medio de su acto de soborno. Como 
?ltimo de los muchos incidentes de violencia y 
temeridad del Presidente Senatorial, se censur? 
mediante la fuerza la entrada de los periodistas 
a las sesiones del Senado, privando al pueblo 
puertorrique?o de la discusi?n que se realiz? 
sobre el presupuesto del pa?s. Los incidentes 
llegaron a la violencia verbal y f?sica entre 
senadores, y han elevado la indignaci?n del pa?s 
a un punto insostenible de ansiedad y rabia.
El Lcdo. Thomas Rivera Schatz ha tomado virtual 
control del pa?s con sus actitudes tir?nicas y 
fascistas, y no se descarta que desde sus mismas 
gradas se inicien esta semana procesos de 
persecuci?n y violencia contra otros sectores del 
pa?s, apoyados por el Secretario de la Gobernaci?n de Puerto Rico.
Son las 5:00 de la tarde del d?a 30 de junio de 
2010, grupos de estudiantes, profesores y 
ciudadanos pidieron entrada a la Casa de las 
Leyes y fueron golpeados y torturados por la 
Pol?cia, hay numerosos heridos, mientras se 
moviliza la Guardia Nacional hacia el Capitolio. 
Choques violentos se esparcen por toda la zona 
del Parlamento y las represiones contin?an.
Este control de facto del poder pol?tico en la 
Naci?n Puertorrique?a viola todos los m?s 
elementales principios de la democracia y del 
gobierno participativo, por lo que enteramos al 
mundo de la actual situaci?n de violencia 
contenida que existe en nuestro pueblo y que est? 
a punto de estallar contra estos dos pol?ticos 
que han tomado por asalto el poder del pa?s. A?n 
cuando en Puerto Rico no existen las condiciones 
para un levantamiento armado popular por la obvia 
desigualdad de las fuerzas en pugna, una 
revoluci?n de afirmaci?n cultural y estudiantil 
comienza a tomar las calles y a rescatar los 
espacios robados por los autores de este golpe.
Exhortamos a todos los medios de comunicaci?n del 
mundo a que den noticia de la actual situaci?n de 
la Naci?n Puertorrique?a y solicitamos por ende su completa solidaridad.

Redactado por Roberto Ramos-Perea, dramaturgo puertorrique?o.
(Con la activa colaboraci?n, comentarios y apoyo 
de m?s de un centenar de ciudadanos puertorrique?os.)





Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul  1 10:30:07 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:30:07 -0700
Subject: [News] The anatomy of an attack on Iran
Message-ID: <mailman.104.1277994609.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


[]

Middle East
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html
Jul 1, 2010

The anatomy of an attack on Iran
By David Moon

In mid-June, Hugh Tomlinson in the Times of London wrote that the 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>government 
of Saudi Arabia conferred on Israel the "green light" for use of its 
airspace for an attack on Iran. This revelation was said to be 
conventional wisdom inside the Saudi military. Tomlinson also quoted 
an unnamed United States military source stating to the effect that 
the US Department of State and the Defense Department had both said 
"grace" over this arrangement.
The Saudis and Israelis immediately denied the report, while US 
officials made no specific comments on the subject. The silence and 
denials nixed further media speculation.

First reported in the Times of London in July 2009 and referred to 
again in Tomlinson's recent article is word of a supposed meeting 
between Israel's Mossad chief Meir Dagan and unnamed Saudi 
intelligence leaders to discuss such an arrangement that both 
governments denied then and now.

Given the apparent regional political status quo, how might the 
Israeli Air Force (IAF) strike Iran undetected on approach and at the 
very least unacknowledged on return if the decision is made in 
Jerusalem that the existential threat posed by Iran's arc of nuclear 
progress can no longer safely be tolerated?

Although the coordination of logistics and tactics of such a long 
distance mission - 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) on the straight 
line from Tel Aviv to Iran's uranium enrichment facility in Natanz - 
is daunting, the strategic or political realities must be defined 
before all else.

Overflight of Iraq on a direct bearing to Iran is out of the 
question. Such a path would cause friction between the US, 
responsible for Iraq's aerial sovereignty, and the next Iraqi 
government sure to be of delicate composition. It's safe to assume 
that the US views stability in Iraq far higher on the national 
interest meter than say apartments in east Jerusalem, thus for Israel 
the straight line over Iraq comes at a price that it can ill afford to pay.

The likely route to Iran, beginning at regional dusk preferably in 
the dark a new moon, is to fly a great circle around Iraq. Only 
careful planning carried out with precision timing and execution will 
ensure success. For this route, almost every applicable IAF logistics 
and support asset would be utilized.

The first leg for any F-15I and F-16I fighter bombers is a low-level 
run up the Mediterranean in the area of the Syrian town of Latakin, 
where up to three KC-707s (aerial tankers) in race track orbit would 
top up the tanks of the strike group. This tankage is absolutely 
necessary for the shorter-legged F-16I (range 1,300 miles). Refueling 
the F-15I (range 2765 miles) is desirable but not a necessity unless 
intelligence suggests targets beyond eastern Iran.

To skirt Turkish airspace and the ability of the Turkish military to 
raise an alarm heard throughout the North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization (NATO), the strike group with two pairs of Gulfstream 
G-550s: one of each outfitted as a network-centric collaborative 
targeting (NCCT) and one each employing Senior Suter technology must 
fly low across northern Syria. The G-550 is a small package with the 
range the speed to accompany the strike group 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>round trip 
without refueling - therefore up to the challenge.

The NCCT 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>aircraft 
ferrets out air defense radars. The Suter partner beams a data stream 
containing, what in computer parlance is called a "worm", into air 
defense radars with the capability of incapacitating an entire air 
defense network, if such a network is under centralized control.

This technology pioneered by the US Air Force and part of the code 
named the "Big Safari" program is heady stuff said to work wonders 
over Syria during the IAF's strike on Syria's North Korean-designed 
nuclear reactor in September 2007. The support of the G-550s will be 
instrumental every mile of the mission.

Non-networked anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) in states hostile to 
Israel may necessitate F-16Is in the tried and true AGM-88 high speed 
anti-radiation missile (HARM) mission.

Yet another application of high technology was the launch on June 11, 
2007, of Ofek-7, as noted by Richard B Gasparre, also a source on 
G-550s in IAF service at airforce-technology.com, is a "... 
reconnaissance satellite, which gives Israeli intelligence 
specialists site and system mapping capability of unprecedented 
accuracy". Ofek-7 undoubtedly contributed to strike planning for the 
IAF's mission to Syria.

These powerful tools will be counted on to enable the strike package 
to skirt either Turkish or Iraqi airspace for a short jump of 150 or 
so miles to reach Iranian airspace undetected. The distance on a 
straight line from Latakin to Tabriz in Iran is 618 miles. The 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>flight is 
shorter if the Israelis avoid Turkey and cut the Kurdish corner.

At a designated point over northern Iran, the strike group splits 
into Q and E-flights. Q-Flight flies southeast 348 miles to reach the 
known uranium-enrichment sites in Qom (under construction) and Natanz 
(operational). E-Flight homes in on the gas storage development site 
at Esfahan and the heavy water reactor complex at Arak on a more 
southerly path of 481 miles.

All the while in Iranian airspace, the G-550 Suter and NCCT aircraft 
work in tandem and with F-16I aircraft to suppress radars and AAA, 
while F-15Is designated top cover guard against any air-to-air threat 
put up by Iran's air force.

The strike package can count on aid in the form of Popeye Turbo 
cruise missiles launched by at least one Israeli submarine from the 
Arabian Sea against targets in Iran designed to shield the Israeli 
planes, degrade enemy responses and sow confusion among the Iranian military.

At some point, one of the three US Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint ELINT 
(electronic intelligence) platforms in the area will "see" Iranian 
air defense radars and hear an explosion of Iranian voices on open 
airwaves and quickly piece together events in Iran. This collected 
product will be immediately passed through Central Command to 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>Washington 
for dissemination to the principles of the National Security Council, 
including US President Barack Obama.
Seven hours earlier, at least three IAF KC-707s would have flown the 
3,500 miles around the Arabian Peninsula, likely painted up like 
commercial 707 cargo aircraft, transiting international airspace to a 
meeting point over the northern Persian Gulf. At this extreme range, 
each KC-707 carries only an estimated 85,000 lbs of fuel to pass to 
the hungry F-16Is flying 451 miles from Qom and 350 miles from Esfahan.

Each F-16I will require at least 5,000 lbs of jet fuel for the final 
leg of nearly 1,000 miles through northern Saudi Arabia then home. 
Thus, a hinge point in IAF planning; the Israelis must determine the 
mix of F-16Is and KC-707s committed to the mission.

On and over the Persian Gulf, given the presence of US Navy and Air 
Force AWACS platforms such as the EC-2 Hawkeye and E-3 Sentry along 
with SPY-1 radars of US Navy cruisers and destroyers, the Israelis 
can have no expectation at all that the refueling scrum of the F-16Is 
will go undetected. During this evolution, any IAF planes too damaged 
to make it home can ditch close to a US Navy ship with a reasonable 
expectation of rescue.

Much will depend on what the US does with the information in hand. 
Does Obama choose to inform Iraqi and Gulf Cooperation Council allies 
of the situation, or will various US radars simply go into 
"diagnostic mode", as if operators cannot believe what they see?

If Obama's decision is to watch and listen, the strike group can try 
a run for home across northern Saudi Arabia. Here, the Saudis have a 
decision. The Saudi Air Force can defend the kingdom's airspace, 
possibly taking loses and handing out same, or the Israelis can bet 
on G-550s tricking out the kingdom's air defenses in a manner that 
gives the Saudis an excuse to say they were blinded by the IAF and 
the non-cooperation of the US.

By flying north, the IAF reaps the benefits of plausible deniability, 
a political necessity for US and allied Arab states. These states can 
honestly say they had no prior knowledge of IAF planes winging it to 
Iran with full racks of missiles and bombs.

Another option is available to the Israelis to increase the IAF's 
odds of flying the northern leg undetected. This choice is to strike 
the "Duchy of Nasrallah" - Hezbollah under Hassan Nasrallah in 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>Lebanon - to 
create cover and sow confusion. If the IAF is to strike Iran, 
immediate blowback is to be expected from Iran-supported Hezbollah's 
extensive inventory of unguided missiles.

On June 18, the 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LG01Ak01.html#>aircraft 
carrier USS Harry S Truman and task group including the German 
frigate Hessen in the company of an unidentified Israeli naval vessel 
made a fast transit of the Suez Canal. The Egyptians not only closed 
the canal to all traffic, all fishing boats where docked, while the 
Egyptian military lined the banks of the canal. All facets of this 
passage rank as extraordinary.

It is readily apparent that the US Department of State and the 
Pentagon collaborated closely with an Arab country to create a lane 
of fast transit not only for US Navy assets and an attached NATO 
ally, but for an Israeli ship.

One more element, the IDF launched their improved Ofek-9 
reconnaissance satellite on June 22. Is this a matter of timing or of 
coincidence?

Tensions are high in the region, yet little could precipitate a full 
diplomatic meltdown quicker than for Iran to directly challenge 
Israel's blockade of Gaza. And this confrontation is in no way 
limited to Israel and Iran. Such a provocation could easily inflame 
public opinion in Sunni Arab states, where leaders are weary of 
Tehran's grandstanding on the question of Israel. Tehran's rhetoric 
of threats toward Israel politically undermines Arab governments seen 
as less fervent on the subject.

CNN reported on June 24 on Iran's canceled designs to directly test 
the Gaza blockade. Hossein Sheikholeslam, secretary general of the 
International Conference for the Support of the Palestinian Intifada, 
said, "In order not to give the Zionist regime an excuse, we will 
send the aid through other routes and without Iran's name."

Sheiholeslam's comment makes little sense, as the point of Iran's aid 
exercise was to win the propaganda war against Israel and Arab 
states. Whatever Iran's "excuse", there is reason now to suspect the 
Tehran regime will back down if decisively confronted by a motivated 
and unified coalition of area states.

David Moon is a regular contributor from the United States. He can be 
contacted at <mailto:uscontributor at aol.com>uscontributor at aol.com.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul  1 13:51:11 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:51:11 -0700
Subject: [News] Video links to police assault in Puerto Rico
Message-ID: <mailman.120.1278006676.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


Here are some links to videos of yesterday afternoon's police assault 
on the Puerto Rican public this afternoon, for the "crime" of seeking 
access to the legislature as it debated the budget for the next 
fiscal year. Even if you don't understand Spanish, you'll get the drift...


<http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/primeraplana/motin-en-el-capitolio/20100630224736>http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/primeraplana/motin-en-el-capitolio/20100630224736

http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/flash_news/las-fuerzas-estaban-listas-para-enfrentarse/20100630225322

<http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/flash_news/mas-escenas-del-motin-en-el-capitolio/20100630191331>http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/flash_news/mas-escenas-del-motin-en-el-capitolio/20100630191331

http://www.wapa.tv/noticias/flash_news/reacciona-el-superintendente/20100630191454

<http://www.primerahora.com/videosdelmotinenelcapitolio-397282.html>http://www.primerahora.com/videosdelmotinenelcapitolio-397282.html



Jan Susler
People's Law Office
1180 N. Milwaukee
Chicago, IL 60642
773/235-0070 x 118
jsusler at aol.com



Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  2 10:40:33 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:40:33 -0700
Subject: [News] Maradona: the anti-imperialist perfect ten
Message-ID: <mailman.134.1278081802.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Maradona: the anti-imperialist perfect ten



July 1, 2010

http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/maradona-the-anti-imperialist-perfect-ten/


Jos? Steinsleger ? La Jornada

Translation: Machetera for Tlaxcala

In journalism schools, when young people learn 
about the concept of ?news,? their teachers 
resort to a classic example: news is when a 
person bites a dog, not the other way round.  But 
just this past March in Buenos Aires, Diego 
Maradona?s dog bit his upper lip, and the news flew round the world.

The star was rushed to emergency surgery 
(stitches and facial surgery) and experts on the 
subject turned their attention to the grotesque 
Bella, a costly example of the Chinese Shar Pei 
species.  With serene, balanced, affable 
characters, Shar Pei can react unpredictably if 
one looks them in the eye, face to face.

Whatever he says, or doesn?t say, does or doesn?t 
do, Maradona is always news.  And leaders like 
Fidel Castro, Hugo Ch?vez, Evo Morales, N?stor 
Kirchner or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad understand that 
the star?s political messages move the 
consciousness of the poor and exploited on five continents.

With some disdain, the elite on the left and 
right agree: he is a diva, alienated, crazy, 
demagogue, opportunist, degenerate, media 
phenomenon, cocaine-addict, populist, 
myth
myth?  A myth, I believe, is the sublimation 
of intellectually inflated references and 
abstract imagined theories to avoid practical 
adherence to the real and concrete.

 From poverty, to soccer and fame, from the abyss 
of cocaine and treatment in Cuba for his 
addiction, the best player of the twentieth 
century according to FIFA (53.6 percent of those 
polled) has proven himself to be a generous and 
grateful man.  In 2000, he donated the royalties 
from his biography ?I am Diego? to the people of 
Cuba and to Fidel, and ever since, he has carried 
a tattoo of Che on his right arm and one of the Comandante on his left calf.

Liberals can?t stand Maradona.  Is it because his 
speeches barely trouble the powerful?  In 
contrast, the right wing mob and parrots of world 
power are alarmed to hear his statements in favor 
of player unionization (the soccer workers, he 
says), and the eventual impact that this would 
have on the businesses in this industry that move 
billions in cash every second.

In clear, fierce, confrontational struggle, 
Maradona has leaned on his untouchable fame in 
order to liberate, upward and to the right, 
ideals that correspond politically to those below 
and to the left.  And alas, here lies the real 
substance of his differences with Pel?, the Uncle 
Tom of global capitalist soccer.

In November of 2005, motivated by the historical 
presidential summit in Mar del Plata (where the 
free trade project for the Americas, ALCA, was 
buried), the people closely followed Maradona?s 
thinking.  Before boarding the so-called ALBA 
train (the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian 
Alliance for the People of Our America), that 
left from Buenos Aires for Mar del Plata along 
with then presidential candidate Evo Morales, the 
musician Manu Chao, and the Serbian film director 
Emir Kusturica, Diego told the media: ?I ask 
Argentineans to understand that we are heading 
for dignity, to defend what is ours
It?s a matter 
of pride to be on this train in order to 
repudiate the trash that is Bush
If I had him 
under the goal, I?d tear his head off with a well 
placed ball.?  It was a statement of faith that 
the obsessed Boca Juniors fans accompanied with 
bands of street musicians and bass drums.

In December of 2007, after a game with Brazil, 
Maradona was in the locker room where he met 
Iran?s charge d?affaires, and expressed his 
admiration for President Ahmadinejad.  ?I?ve 
already met Ch?vez and Fidel.  Now I want to get 
to know your president
I?m with the Iranians from 
the bottom of my heart, honestly I say: I?m with the people of Iran.?

Kusturica presented the documentary Maradona at 
the Cannes film festival in 2008, and spared no 
praise toward someone who is seen as a god by his 
followers.  He observed: ?He creates magical 
moments.  If we were to compare soccer?s 
popularity in imperial Roman terms, he'd be 
qualified to be a god.?  Which led El Diez 
[Number Ten] to hurriedly respond that he didn?t 
feel like a god, ?but if the people consider me 
one, I?m not going to contradict them.?  Maradona 
has altars in his honor in Naples, and after the 
God-granted goal against England (M?xico, 1986), 
the Scottish Tartan Army team included him in 
their anthem.  And in Rosario (birthplace of Che 
and Messi), fans founded the Church of Maradona 
in 2003, its era beginning in 1960, the year El Diez was born.

Maradona?s political convictions and faith are 
something to watched.  Once, after hearing the 
Pope and seeing the golden ceilings in St. 
Peter?s Basilica, his voice echoed down the 
hallways of the Vatican: ?The church ? according 
to the press ? assures us that it is worried 
about poor kids.  So: sell the ceilings, man!  Do something!?

Understanding something about destiny, the 
technical director of the Argentinean team dealt 
calmly with Bella?s bite.  And upon seeing that 
he'd been lodged in Room 606 at the Los Arcos* 
hospital, he took it as a sign of good luck.  Or 
is there anyone alive who doesn?t know that for 
Chinese gamblers, the number 6 stands for a dog, 
in the interpretation of dreams?

*Translator?s note: the Spanish word for a soccer goal is ?arco.?




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  2 10:56:21 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:56:21 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?India_-_Who_are_India=92s_Maoists=2C_and_Wh?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?at__Do_They_Want=3F?=
Message-ID: <mailman.139.1278082773.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



<http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/who-are-indias-maoists-and-what-do-they-want/>Who 
are India?s Maoists, and What Do They Want?

<http://revolutionaryfrontlines.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/india-maoists-patchwork-corridor.jpg>
[]



Rita Khanna
http://radicalnotes.com/journal/2009/11/19/war-against-the-maoists-but-who-are-they-and-what-do-they-want/

This is meant to be a simple and brief exposition 
of the goals and strategies of the Maoist 
movement in India for people who may not have 
much awareness about it and are confused by the 
propaganda in the mainstream media. This does not 
go into the arcane debates about mode of 
production in India, the debates among communist 
revolutionaries over strategy and tactics etc. 
This aims at people who, for example, are 
perplexed why the Maoists, instead of trying to 
ensure safe drinking water like an NGO, rather, 
often resort to violent activities against the Government.

The Indian government is launching a full-scale 
war against the Maoist rebels and the people led 
by them in different parts of the country. The 
initial battles, without any formal announcement, 
have already started. For this purpose, they 
intend to deploy about 75,000 security personnel 
[the current figure is over 200,000] in parts of 
Central and Eastern India, including 
Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand. The 
government will organize its regular air-force in 
addition to paramilitary and specially trained 
COBRA forces. The air-force has begun to extend its logistic support.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister 
P. Chidambaram have declared the Maoist rebels to 
be ?the biggest internal security threat? to 
India and a hindrance to ?development?. The 
mainstream media seem to have taken them at their 
face value. Their publications and television 
programmes seem to be building a war-hysteria 
against the Maoist rebels regardless of the fact 
that this attack by the government will be 
directed against some of the most deprived of the 
Indian people. Indeed this is turning into a war 
of the state against its own people!

While paying lip service at times to the notion 
that the current people?s insurgency led by the 
Maoist rebels has its root in decades of vicious 
exploitation of the poor, especially the dalits 
and tribals, the blare of government propaganda 
tries to convince us that the Maoist rebels are 
dangerous, blood-thirsty terrorists determined to 
establish their areas of influence. The 
Government is preaching that the Maoists can go 
to any extent to maintain their influence in 
these areas ? by either preventing the government 
from undertaking development activities or using 
the power of their guns, killing disobedient 
individuals. Their ideology is to terrorise the 
common people, wrest power from the 
democratically elected governments and destroy 
the entire fabric of the society.

The government and the media want us to believe 
that the only people, apart from a few romantic 
misguided intellectuals, who willingly support 
Maoists are the poor, ignorant, uneducated, 
uninformed tribal people. They seem to claim that 
no sensible, intelligent person living in a 
society like ours would support them voluntarily. But is this a true picture?

Could it be that the Maoist rebels are supporting 
and organizing the poor, exploited people to 
fight oppression, to establish a more egalitarian 
society where the wealth of our growing economy 
will be spread among all, not merely among a very 
small minority? Could it be that in the name of 
suppressing the Maoists, the state is going all 
out to break the backbone of these poor peoples? 
fight? Could it be that the government is 
planning to wage a war, in our name, against our 
own sisters and brothers to help line the pockets of the rich?

In this hour of crisis, we must ask those 
questions that the government seeks to suppress.

What do we really know about the Maoist rebels, 
their ideology, their plans and programs? Why 
does the government need to go to war against its 
own people and inside its own territory? Are the 
Maoists really blocking development? Who are 
these Maoists anyway and what do they want?

Let us take one question at a time.

Who are these Maoists?

The Maoists are revolutionaries mainly consisting 
of the extremely poor people including a large 
number of dalits and tribals. They come mainly 
from the toiling masses of India and they are 
trying to organize the vast population of such 
masses of this country. They seek to arm and 
train them so that these masses can resist the 
onslaught of the rich. In this effort they go 
beyond the idea that mass movements should focus 
on some specific issues like increase of wages, 
better health care, more honesty of public servants and so forth.

The view of the Maoist rebels is that the poor 
and exploited people must first and foremost 
establish their own democratic political power 
and their own state power in various places. This 
is because without controlling state power, the 
poor and the exploited can at most hope for only 
limited improvements in their living conditions, 
i.e., so long as it does not inconvenience the 
rich who usually control the state power. So, the 
Maoists mobilize the poor to fight against the 
existing state, even armed fight if possible, as 
they consider the existing state to be a set of 
agents acting for the big multinational 
corporations, rich landlords and the wealthy in general.

The fight is an extremely challenging and unequal 
one as the rich are aided by the government 
bureaucrats, the police and even the military. 
Also, contrary to what the Government and the 
mainstream media are propagating, the Maoist 
rebels are actually completely opposed to 
individual killings, they openly denigrate such 
stray terrorism-like acts. What they have been 
attempting to build up is a mass movement, even 
armed, to take on the violence of the ruling 
classes and its representative state machinery.

The Maoist movement was born in India in the late 
1960s, after a radical section of political 
workers broke away mainly from the Communist 
Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) because they felt 
the CPIM and other such parties like CPI, RSP, 
etc. had discredited themselves with their 
opportunist politics of placating and 
compromising with the rich. The movement has a 
long history of development. The present party, 
CPI (Maoist), came into being in 2004 by the 
merger of a number of fraternal organizations.

Is development in India arrested because the Maoist rebels are blocking it?

What is the state of the people of India at 
present? With its current high rate of growth, 
this is also a country of abject poverty and 
extreme inequality. Home to 24 billionaires 
(second largest in Asia according to Forbes), 
India can also boast of 230 million people who go 
to bed on a half empty stomach (World Hunger Report).

A country whose economy grows at 9% cannot feed 
its own population ? at least 50% of the people 
live below the official poverty line and 47% of 
children below the age of three are underweight 
(World Bank report, Undernourished children: A 
call for reform and action). In this so called 
?hub of knowledge economy?, only 11% of the total 
population can afford higher education and 50% of 
the students drop out before class eight to start 
living as casual labourers (Education Statistics, 
Ministry of Human Resource Development). This is 
true of most of India not just the areas where 
Maoist influence and control is high. Then how 
can we say that development in India is being blocked by Maoists?

Maoists do not oppose ?development? at all, they 
only oppose the ?pro-rich development? at the 
expense of destitution or often total destruction 
of the poor. For example, in Dandakaranya region 
of Chhattisgarh they oppose setting up of 
helipads but there, the poor themselves, led by 
the Maoist rebels, have built irrigation tanks 
and wells for help in agriculture something the 
Indian government did not bother to do. The 
Indian government routinely blames the Maoist 
rebels that they blow up schools! But what the 
Government tries to suppress is that these 
blown-up school buildings were actually being 
used or requisitioned to become camps for security personnel!

And what changes do they want? Why do they want these changes?

(1) Overhauling the entire structure of oppression instead of piecemeal reforms

In addition to all the woes described above, 
India is also a country, where thousands of 
Muslims can be butchered in broad daylight by 
fascist Hindu forces (the most widespread and 
gruesome such pogrom in recent times happened in 
Gujarat in 2002), while the ministers and police 
look the other way. And these features are not 
stray results of the misdeeds of a few villains. 
The existing socio-political system in India has 
a built-in mechanism which ensures that the 
common masses would be oppressed by a rich and 
powerful few. Widespread systemic violence is 
required and is routinely applied by the Indian 
state so that common people remain disciplined 
and do not revolt in the face of oppression.

(2) Land to the tillers and destruction of the landlord class

About 60% of the Indian population is still 
dependent on agriculture. However the primary 
input, land, is predominantly concentrated in the 
hands of a few landlords and big farmers. Close 
to 60 percent of rural households are effectively 
landless [NSS report]. The elite in the villages, 
by their collusion with the corrupt politicians 
and bureaucrats have blocked any meaningful land 
reforms. In the last four decades the proportion 
of households with little or no land (landless 
and marginal farmer households) has increased 
steadily from 66% to 80%. On the other hand the 
top ten percent rural households own more land 
now than in 1951 (Source: NSS report).The Maoist 
revolutionaries want to change this to ensure 
equitable distribution of land. They do not deter 
from collective armed fight of the landless and 
poor peasants and the poor rural labourers 
against the existing state power for achieving this goal.

(3) Freedom from moneylenders and traders

Indebtedness in rural India has been increasing 
by leaps and bounds especially in the recent 
decades. Public rural banks are closing down due 
to relaxation of government regulation. 
Therefore, instead of securing credits from 
public institutional sources, rural folk are now 
being forced to approach the village money 
lenders (who are often big landlords or rich 
farmers as well) on a larger and larger scale. 
Unscrupulous traders are adding to the misery of 
the poor peasants. They sell spurious inputs to 
small and marginal peasants at exorbitant prices. 
They also make huge profits by buying their 
harvest at throwaway prices and selling them in urban areas at a premium.

Not-so-well-off peasants, in this no-win 
situation, of course end up needing substantial 
credit. Private moneylenders and various 
for-profit financial companies take advantage of 
this situation by extracting enormous sums from 
peasants. Interest rate could be as high as 5% 
per month. The BBC News reported that more than 
200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India 
since 1997 under the pressure of such 
indebtedness. The Maoist rebels want to change this.

(4) End of caste system and eradication of untouchability

It is well known that the caste system is still 
thriving in India. Economically it keeps the 
overwhelming majority of the people in dire 
poverty and politically it suppresses their 
fundamental democratic rights. Often the lower 
castes are robbed of their human dignity. They 
are even denied access to public facilities like 
some sources of drinking water, schools etc. An 
expert group of the planning commission reports 
that in 70% villages lower caste people cannot 
enter places of worship and in more than 50% 
villages they don?t have access to common water 
sources 
(<http://planningcommission.gov.in/reports/publications/rep_dce.pdf>Expert 
committee report to the Planning Commission).

According to an NCDHR report, on average, 27 
atrocities (including murder, abduction and rape) 
against dalits take place every day. The well-off 
landed sections in the villages still come mainly 
from the upper castes. They use brahminical 
ideology to try to keep all other sections of the 
population under domination. The same is true for 
usurers, merchants, hoarders, quarry owners, 
contractors-all mainly come from the upper 
castes. In short, the upper castes are still very 
much in command in all aspects of rural life. 
Often with their own private army of goondas they 
run a parallel raj. The Maoists want to break 
this stranglehold of the upper castes and ensure 
equal rights for dalits and adivasis.

(5) Freedom from exploitation by foreign multinationals and its local partners

Since 1991, foreign capital in alliance with big 
capitalists like Reliance, Tata and state 
bureaucrats, has penetrated vast sectors of the 
Indian economy. Every sphere of our life, 
starting from road construction, electricity 
generation, communication networks to food 
retail, health and education are under direct 
control of this coterie. In the name of 
?development? thousands of acres of land are 
being transferred to big business and 
multinationals. For example, in Bastar, 
Chattisgarh, in the name of Bodh Ghat dam, tens 
of thousands of Adivasis are being forcibly 
evicted from their ?jal-jangal-zameen? 
(water-forest-land). In Niyamgiri, Orissa the 
land which is the abode of several Dongria tribes 
has been handed over to the multinational Vedanta 
group which will completely destroy the 
livelihood of these tribes affecting more than 
20,000 people. The state government and the 
mainstream opposition parties of the state are 
actively supporting such activities. The Maoists, 
over the years, have been resisting such plunder.

(6) Ensuring people?s democratic rights

It is well known that elections are often a sham 
in India. The parliament, as we have seen several 
times, is a bazaar where the rich and the 
super-rich can buy the MPs. According to ADR 
(Association of Democratic Reform), the average 
asset of an MP has gone up to 5.12 crore in 2009 
from Rs 1.8 crore in 2004. In our democracy the 
erstwhile rajas and maharajas, like Scindias, are 
still proliferating and controlling the local 
economy and polity at many places.

And we also know the state of judicial system in 
our country. Salman Khans and Sanjeev Nandas can 
kill by running cars over common people and still 
they can escape the law for very long, perhaps 
forever. B.N. Kirpal, the judge, who arbitrarily 
ordered that Indian rivers be interlinked, 
ignoring the resulting ecological and human 
calamity, joined the environmental board of 
Coca-Cola after he retired. The Maoists want to 
establish people?s court where poor people can 
get true justice. In fact, such courts run in 
many places where the Maoist movement is strong.

(7) Self-determination for the nationalities

The Indian government ruthlessly suppresses 
national aspirations of a number of people. These 
people and their land became part of India by 
accident ? because the British raj annexed their 
homeland or a despotic king wanted their land to 
be a part of India. Lakhs of Indian troops have 
been deployed in Kashmir and north-eastern states 
to curb such struggles of the people in these 
states for their national self-determination. 
Since 1958, AFSPA has been imposed in 
north-eastern states, which allows armed forces 
to conduct search and seizure without warrant, to 
arrest without warrant, to destroy any house 
without any verification and to shoot to kill 
with full impunity. In Kashmir, there is 1 
military personnel for every 15 civilian. Cold 
blooded murders, like those of Thangjam Manorama 
Devi, Chungkham Sanjit, Neelofar and Asiya Jan, 
are carried out frequently in the name of 
?countering terrorism?. The Maoist rebels seek to 
establish freedom of self determination for all nationalities.

So, to sum up, the new society the Maoists want 
to establish will have the following components:

-Land to the poor and landless. Later on 
cooperative farming is to be established on voluntary basis.

-Forest to the tribal people.

-End of rule of the rich and the upper caste in 
villages and uprooting of caste system. Uproot 
all discriminations based on gender and religion.

-Seizure of the ill gotten wealth and assets of 
multinational corporations and their local Indian partners.

-Self determination for the nationalities, political autonomy for the tribes.

-Establish a state by the poor, for the poor 
where the present day exploiters would be expropriated.

-Participation of people in day to day 
administrative work and decision making. 
Democracy at the true grassroot level with people 
having the power to recall its democratic representatives.

In summary: ensuring that all types of freedom, 
rights and democracy for all sections of toiling masses.

What have the Maoists-led people?s struggles achieved so far?

Information in this section is taken, purposely, 
from 
<http://planningcommission.gov.in/reports/publications/rep_dce.pdf>the 
expert group report to the planning commission, which is available on the web.

Contrary to what the media try to portray, the 
government?s own report says that the movement 
led by the Maoist rebels cannot be seen as simply 
blowing up of police stations and killing 
individual people. It encompasses mass 
organization. Mass participation in militant 
protest has always been a characteristic of such mobilisation.

Although the Maoists by their own admission are 
engaged in a long term people?s struggle against 
the oppression by the present India state, their 
movement has already achieved some short term 
successes in improving the condition of the poor people.

Maoist movement in India was built around the 
demand of ?land to the tillers?. Numerous 
struggles, led by the Maoists, have been fought 
all over the country especially in Andhra 
Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, to free land from 
the big landholding families. In many such cases 
landlords have been driven away from the villages 
and their land has been put in the possession of 
the landless poor. But the police and 
paramilitary do not allow the poor to cultivate 
such lands. In Bihar, landless Musahars, the 
lowest among the Dalits have struggled and have 
taken possession of fallow Government land. This 
has had the support of Maoists.

Under the leadership of the Maoists the adivasis 
have reclaimed forest land on an extensive scale 
in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, the Vidarbha 
region of Maharashtra, Orissa and Jharkhand. The 
adivasis displaced by irrigation projects in 
Orissa had to migrate to the forests of 
Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh in large 
numbers. The forest department officials harassed 
and evicted them on a regular basis. The movement 
led by the Maoists put an end to this.

In rural India the Minimum Wages Act remains an 
act on paper only. In the forest areas of Andhra 
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Maharashtra, and 
Jharkhand, non-payment of the legal wages was a 
major source of exploitation of adivasi labourer. 
Maoists-led struggles have put an effective end 
to it. These struggles have secured increases in 
the rate of payment for picking tendu leaves 
(used for rolling beedies), washing clothes, 
making pots, tending cattle, repairing implements 
etc. The exploitation previously had been so 
severe that as a result of the sustained movement 
led by Maoists the pay rates of tendu leaves 
collection have over the years increased by fifty times.

The movement has given confidence to the 
oppressed to assert their rights and demand 
respect and dignity from the dominant castes and 
classes. The everyday humiliation and sexual 
exploitation of labouring women of dalit and 
tribal communities by upper caste men has been 
successfully fought. Forced labour, begari, by 
which the toiling castes had to provide 
obligatory service for free to the upper castes 
was also put an end to in many parts of the country.

In rural India, disputes are commonly taken to 
the rich and powerful of the village (who are 
generally the landlords) and caste panchayats, 
where the dispensation of justice is in favour of 
the rich and powerful. The Maoist movement has 
provided a mechanism, usually described as the 
?People?s Court? whereby these disputes are 
resolved in the interests of the wronged party.

Why then, does the government need to go to war 
against its own people led by these rebels 
instead of hailing them as true patriots?

There is a simple answer. Chattisgarh, Orissa are 
rich in mineral wealth that can be sold to the 
highest multinational bidder. The only obstacle 
standing between the corrupt politicians and ALL 
THIS MONEY are the poor, disenfranchised tribal 
people (and the Maoists leading them). So, this 
war. This is not something new in India or for 
that matter in other parts of the world. Mobutu?s 
corrupt regime selling off the Belgian Congo 
piece by piece to the US, Belgium and other 
countries comes to mind. In the sixty years of 
independence from direct colonial rule, the 
Indian state has been doing the same. It has 
systematically impoverished the overwhelming 
majority to serve the interest of a powerful few and their foreign friends.

The impending war to evict the tribal people from 
their villages, in the pretext of eliminating the 
Maoists, will be fought at the behest of big 
corporations, who want to control and plunder our 
resources such as mineral, water and forest. It 
is high time that we recognize this pattern of 
waging war which will be fought by the poor on 
both sides, but will benefit only the big 
capitalists and their cheerleaders in the government.

<http://radicalnotes.com/journal/2009/11/19/war-against-the-maoists-but-who-are-they-and-what-do-they-want/>Radical 
Notes, November 19, 2009




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  2 10:59:35 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:59:35 -0700
Subject: [News] Puerto Rico - Police Attacks Calculated to Supress Civil
	Rights
Message-ID: <mailman.142.1278082773.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

PUERTO RICO: OPERATIONS CALCULATED TO RESTRICT CIVIL RIGHTS

http://www.argenpress.info/2010/07/puerto-rico-operaciones-calculadas-para.html
Jes?s D?vila
translated by Jan Susler

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, July 1, 2010 (NCM) ? A 
calculated police operation, according to sworn 
testimony this morning by one of the agents, left 
yesterday afternoon in front of the Capitol 
dozens of demonstrators injured and journalists 
attacked, and served as a framework so that 
behind closed doors the legislature could annul 
the university students? constitutional rights of 
assembly and freedom of speech.

The sworn statement? a copy of which NCM News 
obtained? specifies how the order to disperse the 
crowd was given at least two hours before more 
than a hundred Puerto Rico Police, among them the 
anti-riot force, the horses of the mounted unit 
and a helicopter, swept with batons, kicks and 
gas hundreds of demonstrators who insisted on 
asserting the right that the  legislature be open to the public.

To make matters even worse, the first to be 
violently dispersed were the reporters from the 
student media, who had gone to the Capitol to 
cover the events, and whose press credentials the 
government refused to recognize. Several member 
of the general press and at least two legislators ended up injured as well.

At the close of this edition, a statement was 
expected from the media guilds as well as an 
urgent press conference by the Puerto Rican 
Independence Party, calling the Puerto Rico Police action ?gorilla-like.?

Without knowing that it had all happened in a 
calculated way by police commands, Capitol 
employees last night expressed their indignation 
at the picture of some of their vehicles 
overturned by the mass of students, professors, 
and support groups that faced the onslaught of 
batons and gas by police who had no fear of 
punishment. A little later, the legislature 
announced the approval of a new measure that 
eliminated student assemblies and substituted 
them with a remote electronic voting system, 
which any public expression by an official 
student leader must also be subjected to.

The measure substitutes for another which had 
proposed the system of internet voting for 
assemblies of every university organism, 
including professors, and which a source in the 
industry estimated would cost over $50 million to 
establish. That measure would have exempted only 
the Board of Trustees, which would be the only 
organism capable of deliberating and decision 
making without being subjected to the restrictions.

But in fact, a source of the ruling New 
Progressive Party? which in the past has provided 
reliable information and even confidential 
documents? assured days ago that the objective 
was to change the project to the one that was 
ultimately adopted. The source indicated that 
it?s all part of a broader agenda to eliminate in 
Puerto Rico the old constitutional right of 
freedom of assembly and substitute it with 
electronic voting, which would guarantee the 
preponderance of the so-called silent majority.
Minutes before the new restriction on 
constitutional rights was approved, the minority 
opposition Popular Democratic Party had withdrawn 
from the Senate floor, as a sign of protest. 
Senate president Thomas Rivera Schatz proclaimed 
that they had managed to be able to complete the 
final work of the ordinary session of the 
Legislature ?in this peaceful environment.?

Rivera Schatz himself was an important piece in 
the entire operation when on Friday last week, in 
an action for which officials provided 
contradictory explanations, he ordered the 
expulsion of all journalists from the Senate 
sessions. To accomplish this, he used armed 
police and locks that blocked the press from 
entering, and it stood out in public opinion that 
the public galleries in the third floor had been 
closed since the end of last year.

The PDP minority and the journalists turned to 
separate legal recourse, still pending in court, 
while a group of students from the University of 
Puerto Rico Mayag?ez campus called for a 
demonstration yesterday, at which the student 
collectives from several campuses throughout the 
country came together. The Senate, meanwhile, 
which had gone back to permitting journalists to 
enter and which had opened its galleries, put the 
locks back on, and starting early in the 
afternoon the anti-riot squads, known as the 
?Shock Troops? entered the building.

The problem of civil rights is crucial for the 
statehood movement, which has been complaining 
for years that the social and political 
institutions don?t recognize its overwhelming 
majority, as a result of which they have taken 
steps such as last year?s elimination of 
compulsory bar association membership for 
attorneys, because statehood has never gotten a 
majority at its conventions. On the other hand, 
the government understands that the student 
movement carried out a successful two month 
strike that paralyzed the eleven UPR campuses.

Similarly, the legislature approved another 
measure, to criminalize any social protest that 
paralyzes public or private construction sites.

But the isolation of the NPP, barely a year and a 
half after having won the most sweeping electoral 
victory in its history, isn?t limited to the 
student revolt or the political opposition. The 
party is already showing signs of division, such 
as growing complaints from important business 
sectors such as the hotel and insurance 
industries, as well as small town governments.

The situation has a lot to do with the attempts 
to increase government funds, while the country 
continues to be submerged in a galloping economic 
crisis, with more than 100,000 jobs lost since 
the beginning of last year. In this context, the 
divided labor movement continues to be paralyzed, 
and in the social sphere, only groups like the 
students present an articulate opposition to governmental plans.

With great difficulty, at the end of the night, 
the legislature managed to approve a deficit 
budget for state agencies, from the marble and 
alabaster building of the Capitol, in whose 
shadow, even hours after the incidents, the acrid 
odor of tear gas could still be breathed.






Freedom Archives
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  2 11:28:21 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:28:21 -0700
Subject: [News] Queers Against Israeli Apartheid refuse to be silenced
Message-ID: <mailman.149.1278084593.24962.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


Queers Against Israeli Apartheid refuse to be silenced
Savannah Garmon, The Electronic Intifada, 1 July 2010

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11368.shtml

----------

On the morning of 25 May, the Board of Pride Toronto held a press 
conference on the lawn outside its offices to announce that the 
phrase "Israeli Apartheid" would be censored from the upcoming 2010 
Pride Parade. The decision, aimed at banning the Toronto-based 
activist group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from the parade, set 
off a firestorm in the community, including refusals to participate 
in the festival and an open letter denouncing the decision by eight 
founding members who organized the first Toronto Pride parade in 1981.

The attempt to ban political speech at Pride Toronto fits a clear 
pattern -- Israel's public relations machine has attempted to malign 
critics and silence dissent around the world for decades. And these 
attempts have recently reached new heights in Canada, in response to 
the success that Palestine solidarity activists in Canada have 
achieved in recent years.

The first Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) -- now an annual, 
international political gathering -- was held on the University of 
Toronto campus in 2005. The organizers of IAW have endorsed the call 
by Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions 
(BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law. The 
BDS movement is modeled on the boycott campaign that was successful 
in helping to bring apartheid to an end in South Africa through 
nonviolent means.

The apartheid analogy has put Israel and its apologists on the 
offensive because it has garnered unexpected levels of support 
through BDS and other tactics that aim to challenge Israeli state policy.

On 2 June 2009, the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat 
anti-Semitism (CPCCA) was formed "... for the stated purpose of 
confronting and combating anti-Semitism in Canada today." However, 
most people involved in the BDS movement saw this as a thinly-veiled 
smear campaign against critics of Israel. The real goal of the CPCCA 
seems to be to conflate all meaningful criticism of Israeli state 
policy with anti-Semitism -- in fact, many believe it may attempt to 
amend Canada's anti-discrimination laws to label criticism of Israel 
as hate speech.

Outright censorship is not the only means in the Israel lobby's 
toolkit for silencing opposition. In recent years, Israel has 
embarked upon a "re-branding" campaign to promote an image of itself 
as a modern, liberal society with open values while whitewashing its 
deplorable human rights record.

A key component of this campaign has been the promotion of Israel as 
a nation with a progressive outlook on lesbian, gay, bisexual and 
transgender (LGBT) issues, especially in relation to its neighbors 
and Palestinian society. There is truth in this, at least for the 
Israeli Jewish population, but claims that this is of widespread 
benefit to Palestinian queers and trans people (e.g. Tel Aviv as a 
"gay Mecca") are unfounded. More importantly, that Israel recognizes 
same-sex marriages performed in other countries does nothing to 
excuse the humanitarian disaster that has resulted from its siege and 
attacks on Gaza.

It was in response to this re-branding campaign that Queers Against 
Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) formed. In fact, there are several members 
of QuAIA who also marched against South African apartheid during the 
1980s in solidarity with South African anti-apartheid activist Simon 
Nkoli, who was a black gay man. Even then, critics disparaged their 
presence in the Pride parade in Toronto, pointing to relatively 
greater acceptance of homosexuality in the white South African 
community compared to blacks living under apartheid. Today, queer 
activists have begun to label this type of expropriation of the LGBT 
struggle to distract from other human rights abuses with the term 
"pink-washing."

QuAIA also endorses the Palestinian civil society call for BDS, and 
in particular a September 2009 initiative to boycott LGBT leisure 
tourism to Israel. This campaign was initiated in response to the 
International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association's decision to hold a 
tourism conference in Tel Aviv in coordination with an Israeli LGBT 
group, Aguda, despite the Palestinian call for the boycott of Israel.

To challenge the re-branding campaign, QuAIA took its message to the 
2008 and 2009 Pride festivals in Toronto, marching without incident. 
The Israel lobby responded to QuAIA's presence with outrage and 
initiated a smear campaign against the group. Israel lobby groups 
such as B'nai Brith and the Simon Wiesenthal center attempted to 
portray QuAIA as an anti-Semitic hate group, despite the fact that 
many of our members have histories of anti-racist activism and many 
are Jewish themselves.

After the 2009 parade, a propaganda film was made against QuAIA by a 
local gay Jewish lawyer and self-proclaimed "gay activist." The film 
was distributed to city councilors in an attempt to convince them to 
pass a city resolution that threatened to defund Pride Toronto unless 
they banned our group from marching in 2010. What followed was a 
complex series of events; eventually, it was revealed through a 
freedom of information request that a small group of city 
bureaucrats, councilors and pro-Israel lobbyists colluded to eject 
QuAIA from the Pride parade despite the fact that they were aware 
that QuAIA in no way violated the city's anti-discrimination policy. 
Notwithstanding this revelation, the Board of Pride Toronto voted 4-3 
on 21 May to ban QuAIA, giving in to this year-long smear campaign.

The fallout from Pride Toronto's decision has been tremendous. The 
queer community of Toronto was galvanized to confront Pride about 
censorship -- after all, censorship has been previously used in 
Canada to force LGBT individuals back into the closet -- and it has 
also brought forward other concerns about de-politicization, 
corporatization and fair representation of less privileged 
communities within the LGBT umbrella. And after a month-long 
community organizing effort, Pride rescinded the ban on 26 June -- a 
significant victory for free speech and the Canadian Palestine 
solidarity movement as a whole.

In a more general sense, across North America -- and even the world 
-- the realization seems to be spreading in the LGBT community that 
our identities and our rights are being used as an excuse to deny the 
identity and the rights of another people, halfway across the globe.

Well before QuAIA formed, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism has 
been championing the message of queer solidarity with Palestine in 
San Francisco. In the wake of the ban against QuAIA and the massive 
attention it has received, at least four new groups have formed 
worldwide projecting a similar message.

Further, a channel of communication has begun to develop between 
queer activists in Palestine and those in the Palestinian Diaspora. 
The two main Palestinian LGBT organizations, ASWAT and al-Qaws, have 
released a joint statement condemning Pride Toronto's banning of our 
group while a new queer Palestinian group has formed endorsing the 
call for BDS. In the end QuAIA invited the Palestinian director of 
al-Qaws to visit with QuAIA during Pride -- she will be marching with 
us in the upcoming parade. In light of all this, the claim some in 
Canada make that "the Palestine/Israel conflict has nothing to do 
with the queer struggle" is further deflated every day.

So it seems that while LGBT people in Palestine have begun speaking 
out both for themselves and for their people as a whole, LGBT 
activists in the West are starting to realize they cannot allow their 
struggles to be co-opted by Israel's colonization schemes. And here 
in Toronto, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid will not be silenced. 
QuAIA will march in this year's Pride Parade this Sunday, 4 July, and 
our demand for justice for all Palestinians, queer and straight 
alike, will be voiced.

Savannah Garmon is an activist for transgender rights, sex worker 
rights and has been active with various groups in the Palestine 
solidarity movement since 2002. She will proudly carry a sign in 
Toronto's upcoming Pride Parade reading "This trans woman is against 
Israeli apartheid and queerer than you."



Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Sat Jul  3 09:53:59 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Sat, 03 Jul 2010 06:53:59 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Luis_Posada_Carriles=92_right_hand_man_nabb?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?ed_in_Venezuela?=
Message-ID: <mailman.13.1278165327.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Luis Posada Carriles? right hand man, Francisco 
Ch?vez Abarca, nabbed in Venezuela

Posted: 02 Jul 2010 05:15 PM PDT

Francisco Ch?vez Abarca, Posada Carriles? Right 
Hand Man, Captured in Venezuela - 
<http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2010/07/02/capturan-en-venezuela-a-francisco-chavez-abarca-mano-derecha-de-posada-carriles/>espa?ol

Translation: Machetera for Tlaxcala

Hugo Ch?vez, Venezuela?s president, reported 
today that the Salvadoran Francisco Ch?vez 
Abarca, accused of being Luis Posada Carriles? 
right hand man, and the author of various 
explosive attacks in Cuba, was arrested in a 
nighttime intelligence operation on Thursday when he tried to enter Venezuela.

In an address from Miraflores Palace (the 
government headquarters), the Venezuelan leader 
explained that Abarca was arrested in the airport 
at Maiquet?a (in the north) and was transferred 
to the headquarters of the Bolivarian 
Intelligence Service (SEBIN) for interrogation.

Nicknamed ?Potbelly,? Ch?vez Abarca is on 
Interpol?s Most Wanted list due to his 
implication in various attacks with explosives in Cuba in the 1990?s.

In the wake of the capture, the Venezuelan 
president asked what might have been the 
Salvadoran?s intention in trying to enter the 
country and ordered verification of the person(s) awaiting him.

?Who wanted Ch?vez Abarca in Venezuela?  Who was 
awaiting him?? the Venezuelan leader asked, 
before reporting that Ch?vez Abarca will be 
delivered to Interpol so that he can be sent to 
Cuba, the country that requested his capture.

He said that ?this gentleman came here to kill me 
- that?s what my heart says,? and he asked for 
collaboration to clarify the ?special mission 
that he came to complete in Venezuela.?

Ch?vez said that midway through the advance of 
the revolution and close to the parliamentary 
elections in September ?it is very strange that a 
terrorist of this caliber should come.?

?Posada Carriles ought to be really nervous 
because we?ve caught one of his people,? he added.

Ch?vez Abarca was under arrest in El Salvador for 
two years for being the leader of a gang 
dedicated to vehicle theft in that country, but 
sidestepped sentencing for other international crimes of which he was accused.

Ch?vez Abarca and 21 members of his gang were 
arrested under charges of automobile theft and 
swindling.  Authorities assured at the time that 
they were dealing with ?one of the main 
structures of organized crime dedicated to 
vehicle theft on a national and Central American level.?

On October 28, 2007, a complacent judge freed 
Ch?vez Abarca from his criminal 
charges.  However, he never had to answer for his 
role as the principal accomplice of Luis Posada 
Carriles.  The campaign for his arrest was never 
mentioned before Salvadoran courts, despite repeated complaints.

In the 1990s, there were indications that he had 
dedicated himself to drug trafficking as well as 
arms sales and currency counterfeiting in Guatemala.

He used the aliases Manuel Gonz?lez, Roberto 
Sol?rzano and William Gonz?lez, and went on three 
short trips to Cuba in April and May of 1997 to 
engage in various attacks there.

In 1997 he detonated a bomb with 600 grams of C-4 
that caused structural damage in the bathrooms of 
the Ach? discotheque in the Hotel Melia Cohiba, on April 12, 1997.

On the 30th of the same month, an explosive 
device with 401 grams of C-4 that the Salvadoran 
had put in an ornamental planter on the 15th 
floor of the same hotel was defused.

Furthermore, on May 24th, while Ch?vez Abarca was 
in M?xico, a bomb exploded in the offices of the 
Cubanac?n corporation in the capital.

President Ch?vez recalled that it has been five 
years since his government made a formal petition 
to Washington for the extradition of Posada 
Carriles, an ex-agent of the Central Intelligence 
Agency (CIA).  Posada Carriles is 82 years old 
and is responsible for, among other crimes, the 
explosive attack in October 6, 1976 against 
Cubana de Aviaci?n Flight 455, where all 73 people on board were killed.

Posada Carriles is free in the United States and 
only accused of violating immigration laws.  The 
United States has not answered Venezuela?s extradition request.

It was Posada Carriles? recruit who planted the 
bomb that killed Fabio di Celmo.

In 1997, following instructions from Posada 
Carriles, ?Potbelly? Ch?vez Abarca was the person 
who contracted with the mercenary Ernesto Cruz 
Le?n and charged him with carrying out terrorist 
missions in Cuba, telling him that he himself had 
done it, and shortly thereafter he trained his 
recruit in the preparation of explosive devices.

This was how Cruz Le?n came to make two trips to 
Cuba during which he planted bombs in Havana 
hotels, one of which killed the young Italian 
tourist Fabio de Celmo, on September 4, 1997.  It 
was the most tragic moment in the criminal terror 
campaign unleashed by Posada on behalf of the 
Cuban American National Foundation, created by the CIA.

(With reporting from Telesur)

Machetera is a member of 
<http://www.tlaxcala.es/>Tlaxcala, the 
international network of translators for 
linguistic diversity. This translation may be 
reprinted as long as the content remains 
unaltered, and the source and translator are cited.




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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Sun Jul  4 18:04:24 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:04:24 -0700
Subject: [News] Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory Unleashes Brutal Civil
 Rights Backlash
Message-ID: <mailman.26.1278281064.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd>Maritza Stanchich, Ph.D.

Posted: July 4, 2010 11:40 AM
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html


<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html>University 
of Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory Unleashes Brutal Civil Rights Backlash

As so many Americans gear up for Fourth of July 
fireworks this weekend, the U.S. Territory of 
Puerto Rico roils from a brutal civil rights 
showdown unleashed by a far-right wing 
government, now seemingly hell bent on destroying 
the recent unprecedented victory of a two-month 
long student strike against privatization of 
higher education at the University of Puerto Rico.

The broader implications are crucial on numerous 
fronts, including the struggle to maintain broad 
access to public higher education and efforts to 
rein in runaway neoliberal policies that have 
wreaked havoc on the global economy, resulting in 
draconian austerity measures worldwide. For the 
violence and repression seen in Greece and at the 
G20 in Toronto appears to now be visiting this 
Caribbean island nation of about four million 
U.S. citizens, the homeland of more than an 
additional four million Puerto Ricans in the 
United States, the second largest U.S. Latino group.

While the economic crisis in Puerto Rico--the 
worst since the 1940s, if not the 1930s-has been 
deepening for years, and the current right wing 
government has aggressively implemented a 
hard-line, unpopular neoliberal agenda since its 
broad electoral victory last November, it appears 
as if the recent UPR student strike victory has 
touched off a firestorm, with a police attack on 
peaceful demonstrators at Puerto Rico's Capitol 
building on Wednesday injuring dozens, some seriously.

The UPR strike concluded June 21 after a tense, 
two-month shut down of 10 campuses in a system 
serving nearly 65,000 students at the end of the 
academic year, with an accord that by all 
accounts was an unprecedented strike victory, in 
historic, hemispheric terms. A widely-supported 
student movement remarkable for its coalition 
building across traditionally distinct and even 
contentious social and political sectors 
coalesced against threatened erosion of broad 
public access to the widely-regarded state 
university, as well as its increasing privatization.

With tensions high after police and riot squads 
had attacked and injured students, their parents 
and journalists on at least three occasions, an 
agreement finally reached through judicial 
mediation met with the students' basic demands, 
reinstating cancelled tuition waivers, 
temporarily forestalling a tuition hike or 
imposition of student fees, and protecting strike 
leaders from summary suspension reprisals. The 
accord, signed by a majority of the Board of 
Trustees, though those refusing included the 
university and board presidents, was hailed as an 
achievement in civil conflict resolution, 
especially in light of the history of previous 
UPR strikes that had ended in deadly violent repressions.

Immediately after however, the Puerto Rico state 
legislature, dominated by the extreme right of 
the local Pro-Statehood party, rapidly expanded 
the university Board of Trustees, with the 
governor approving four new appointees, and a new 
but divided board quickly imposed a $800 student 
fee starting in January, and made it permanent, 
reminiscent of the imposition of fees at 
University of California by then Gov. Ronald 
Reagan. The legislature also quickly dismantled a 
long-standing UPR tradition of student 
assemblies, replacing them with private 
electronic computer voting devoid of open debate. 
Other cuts were also implemented affecting 
professors and adjunct instructors, who now make 
up about 40 percent of the UPR faculty, following 
trends in the United States, where 60 percent of 
all professors occupy such increasingly precarious positions.

In a far worse economic straits than the states 
of California or Michigan, Puerto Rico is 
confronting its worst fiscal crisis in decades, 
and UPR the biggest fiscal crisis of its 100-year 
existence. As throughout much of the world facing 
related circumstances, virulent and organized 
opposition to drastic cuts principally directed 
at the working and deteriorating middle classes 
has mushroomed, especially since the current 
global crisis, in Alan Greenspan's own befuddled 
words, was caused by greed-induced corruption 
among the highest echelons of the world economy.

While the neoliberal agenda of Puerto Rico's 
current political leaders look back to the very 
doctrines now being challenged in the United 
States and throughout Latin America, the UPR 
student movement embodies the vanguard of the 
contemporary 21st Century, as reflected by their 
symbols and tactics, including the democratizing 
internet, egalitarian rainbow flags, sustainable 
organic farming, an effervescence of alternative 
arts, and new coalition building among center, 
right and left, in tandem with occupation 
practices inspired by international student 
movements as far as California, Spain, France and Greece.

Though a shocking collective trauma, the violent 
crackdown at the Capitol Wednesday was not 
entirely surprising given the current 
administration's assault on all fronts since 
coming into power, targeting progressive, 
cultural and social welfare institutions and 
agencies with crippling budget cuts, attempting 
to dissolve Puerto Rico's bar association, 
lifting environmental protections to whole swaths 
of protected lands, and passing a now notorious 
law, called Ley 7, that not only dismisses 20,000 
public employees, but declares null and void all 
public sector union contracts for three years, 
with the only recourse to challenging the law 
being to petition the local Supreme Court, now 
stacked with new appointments in the 
administration's favor. The governor has also 
activated the National Guard, amidst criticism 
from groups such the Puerto Rico chapters of the 
ACLU and Amnesty International.

Common in Puerto Rico, however, though unusual at 
most U.S. state universities, is the way 
political parties assume control of UPR 
leadership by appointing a new president, also 
recently achieved. This is in part because the 
UPR is widely regarded as national patrimony, and 
is one of the few places left in the country where dissent may be cultivated.

As opposition to these policies expands, as seen 
in a massive national strike in October which 
drew a quarter of a million workers into the 
streets, so has the government's seeming 
intolerance to any opposition, as Gov. Luis 
Fortu?o, Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz 
and UPR president Jos? Ram?n de la Torre commonly 
resort to Cold War era red-baiting with media 
campaigns labeling protestors as Socialists, 
Communists, and professional rabble rousers out 
to destabilize the country. The clamp down has so 
far gone as far as banning journalists from 
Senate chambers for four days last week during 
the country's budget sessions, prompting media 
organizations to petition in court to regain access.

"I don't think there is any doubt that the 
intention of this government is to set back civil 
rights," said Judith Berkan, a long-time civil 
rights attorney and a law professor at University 
of Puerto Rico and InterAmerican University in 
San Juan, adding that the administration has 
enacted a staggering number of measures to 
neutralize and debilitate all those perceived as 
a threat to a local oligarchy acting in concert with U.S. interests.

Attempts were made to reach Resident Commissioner 
Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico's non-voting 
representative in the U.S. Congress, and UPR 
President Jos? Ram?n de la Torre for comment, but 
they were not available at press time.

The irony that the Pro-U.S. Statehood party of 
Gov. Fortu?o is now curtailing the most basic 
press and civil liberties is not lost on UPR 
student strike leaders who witnessed and were 
injured at Wednesday's melee, including those who 
belong to the pro-Statehood party themselves, and 
voted for the sitting governor.

"It pains me as a statehooder that this 
government has not learned the lessons of U.S. 
civil rights struggles of decades ago," said 
An?bal N??ez, a student at the UPR law school and 
a member of the student negotiating committee.

N??ez acknowledged the participation of students 
affiliated with Socialist groups among strike 
leaders and the student negotiating committee, 
and said they overcame their differences via 
universal concerns for education as a social 
necessity, as they gained each others' respect 
while coalition building together, adding that if 
he could not overcome ideological differences 
enough to collaborate, he would still believe in 
their right to pluralistically exist.

The notion that accessible, quality higher 
education contributes to economic recovery runs 
counter to the widening U.S. trend of students 
graduating with crippling debt, as public 
education has for years now faced diminishing 
state support. A common argument used by the 
administration during the UPR strike was its 
affordable tuition, at less than $2,000 per year 
for undergraduates before the recently imposed 
fees. But while tuition is cheaper than probably 
any other state university in the United States, 
average income in Puerto Rico is also far lower 
than any other U.S. state, with about 48 percent 
of the population living in poverty as defined by 
U.S. federal standards, and the cost of living in 
San Juan at least, far higher than at oft 
compared institutions in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 
or Oxford, Mississippi. This tradition of 
maintaining broad public access to a quality 
state institution of higher learning is a hard 
earned point of pride at UPR, compared to 
institutions that have recently reneged their 
public mission with sudden and steep fee/tuition 
increases, such as at University of California, 
where students also opposed, occupied and met 
with police repression, but could not stave off a 
32% fee hike imposed in November.

As UPR administrators continue to grapple with 
what was a nearly $200 million budget shortfall 
for next year going into the strike, in search of 
additional or alternative money saving and 
raising sources, an emboldened student movement 
will also regroup and weigh all its options. 
Future conflicts may be averted by altering the 
very style of governance at UPR, a top-down and 
paternalistic holdover from the past, as this 
could go a long way toward making students, as 
well as professors and staff who also have large 
stakes at play, part of a give-and-take process.

For come what may in the global fiscal crisis in 
the coming decade, these students are the future 
of new Americas of increasingly porous borders 
and dramatic, rapid demographic, political, 
cultural, informational and economic shifts, as 
the old order, the vestiges of the Cold War in 
Puerto Rico and in South Florida for example, fade into the proverbial sunset.

"We may not hold the power but we have the will 
power," stated law student N??ez, "and given the choice, I prefer the latter."

UPR administrators and Statehood party leaders 
would do well to recognize and reach out to the 
productive potential of this new power, shift 
gears and learn to act on the principles they purportedly hold dear.




Freedom Archives
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul  6 11:24:33 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:24:33 -0700
Subject: [News] $280 million in Agriculture Losses Due to Gaza Blockade
Message-ID: <mailman.52.1278462771.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Report: Agriculture Losses Due to Gaza Blockade
http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8452

06.07.10 - 11:17

Rami Al Meghari ? Gaza - United Nations officials 
estimate that the Israeli led four year blockade 
on the Gaza Strip has caused some $280 million in agriculture losses.

Philip Lazerini leads the U.N. Office for the 
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the 
occupied territories says the blockade hampers the farming industry in Gaza.

"The agriculture sector is on the brink of 
collapse. The blockade is simply not allowing 
enough material for the farming community to 
sustain itself. Farmers must use all rusty 
equipment, or need to repair equipment. Herders 
are running out of drugs to treat their animals." Lazerini said.

Gaza farmers have concentrated their farming on 
some essential crops- like tomatoes, cucumbers, 
potatoes and, more recently, watermelon. But they 
have a difficult time obtaining seeds and fertilizers to grow crops.

In the central Gaza Strip village of Alzawayda, 
Suleiman Eid tills his land in preparation for 
planting vegetables. Eid has been a farmer for more than 40 years.

"Israel prevented entry of chemicals for 
fertilizing the land. As for the chemicals that 
come through Egypt, they  are not enough or 
efficient. As you see, this heap of organic 
fertilizers has cost me about $800. However, this 
needs chemicals to bolster it. For example, I 
need urea chemicals, but we don't have that at 
the local market. Also, there are other chemical 
substances that can not be found as well," Eid explains.

There are about 1.5 million residents in Gaza. In 
addition to [their own] livelihoods, Gazan 
farmers have played an important role in feeding 
the residents of the coastal territory. Gaza 
farmers also export crops, including strawberries 
and flowers. Before the blockade, Gaza farmers 
exported an estimated 32 million flowers. But 
over the last two years, Israel has restricted 
exports to about 700,000 flowers annually.

Another vital sector in Gaza is fishing, which 
provides an important source of protein to 
families. Under the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, Gaza 
fishermen are allowed to sail up to 12 nautical 
miles off Gaza shores. But Israel has restricted 
fishing boats to only 2 to 3 nautical miles off 
Gaza shores. And these areas have declining fish populations.

"Now we cannot go further off shore. Once we go 
further, an Israeli naval vessel prevents us. 
Consequently, all of us fishermen work within the 
same restricted range. Fishing is very 
restricted, and with all the fishermen working in 
the same area our living is very limited," says 
Maher Alnada a fisherman on the Rafah city coast in southern Gaza.

Recently, Israel has eased the blockade, 
following the deadly attack on a Gaza aid convoy 
and due to increased international pressure.

Raed Fattouh is the Palestinian Authority 
official in charge of coordinating entry of goods 
into Gaza.  He says that Israel has recently 
allowed some shipments of seeds and fishing tools into Gaza

"Currently, the Israeli side has allowed in 600 
items, unlike before, where only 130 items were 
allowed in. As for the goods allowed in, they 
meet the Gaza market needs, but raw materials 
and- more importantly- cement is needed in order 
to fill in the shortage," Fattouh reported.

More goods, such as electronic devices, will be 
allowed in soon, according to Fatthouh. Among the 
goods Israel added to the list: tomato sauce, 
chocolates, chips, children's toys, and some 
shipments of cement and steel to be used in U.N. construction projects.

Many Gazans downplay the decision, and call for a 
complete lifting of the blockade.  Jamal 
Alkhudari is a Gaza Member of Parliament and head 
of the Popular Committee for Breaking the Israeli blockade.

"So far, 3500 items are still banned from flowing 
into Gaza, and this is substantial evidence that 
the Israeli occupation is still enforcing the 
blockade. Yet, by easing the blockade, they 
attempt to send out a message to the outside 
world, to relax the international pressure on 
them on one hand, and legitimize the blockade, on 
the other hand." Alkhudari stated.

According to the Hamas-led agricultural ministry, 
12,000 fishermen are currently jobless, while 
more than 400 fishing boats are no longer functioning.

_______________________________________________________________

Rami Al Meghari is a Palestinian journalist for 
the Gaza Strip he reports for many local and 
international news outlets in both Arabic and 
English. He can be reached at  <mailto:ramimunir at gmail.com>ramimunir at gmail.com
This e-mail address is being protected from spam 
bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul  6 20:32:19 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:32:19 -0700
Subject: [News] Explosive Political Situation in Puerto Rico
Message-ID: <mailman.53.1278462771.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Explosive Political Situation in Puerto Rico

Written by Roberto Ramos-Perea
Tuesday, 06 July 2010 15:27

http://alainet.org/active/39225

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, 
groups of students, teachers and citizens asked 
for entry to the House of the Laws and they were 
struck and tortured by the Police, there are 
numerous injured people, while the National Guard 
is mobilized towards Capitol Hill. Violent shocks 
are scattered over the whole zone of the 
Parliament and the repression continues.

________

A constitutional coup has just been established in Puerto Rico.

After a year in which the present time government 
under the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo 
Progresista, that attempts to join the Island to 
the United States through statehood) tried to and 
succeeded in taking over many institutions that 
form the basis of the democratic government of 
Puerto Rico, an atmosphere of hostility followed 
by many reckless actions that threaten public 
peace had climaxed in violent and aggressive 
actions of this government against the parties of 
the opposition, the organized student movement, 
the labor unions, the press, the environment, as 
against every area and institution of Puerto Rico?s civil society.

This constitutional coup springs from the 
Legislative branch of the government under the 
command of Senator Thomas Rivera Schatz, endorsed 
by the central government, under the dominance of 
the Secretary Governor, counselor Marcos 
Rodr?guez Ema, with the obvious intent of having 
under their grasp and without opposition full 
control of every agency and organization that 
rule the judiciary, academic, economic and civil 
societies. In the face of this scenario, Governor 
Luis Fortu?o operates without volition, has no 
opinion, appearance nor public responsibility.

With the complete control of the High Court of 
Puerto Rico, the University of Puerto Rico Board 
of trustees, and the alleged control of the news 
media, among many others, the genuine 
participation of the People of Puerto Rico in all 
democratic processes protected by our Constitution is jeopardized.

The events started (through the rush approval of 
Law 7 by the Legislature) with more than 20,000 
public employee lay-offs, with the allegation 
that this would alleviate the gigantism of the 
government and would find the solution to the 
serious public deficit, that has never been 
properly evidenced. This decision has caused 
economical chaos, public services are worse than 
ever and it has generated despair and gloominess 
in every Puerto Rican family. In this same guise 
there exists a serious persecution against all 
artistic institutions of the country, strangling 
their budgets, trying with this action to avoid 
the propagation of art as dissidence. This, while 
the government favors contracts of obscene sums 
with hundreds of advisors, contractors and 
lobbyists associated with their own political party.

The attacks continued in the form of the 
appointment to the High Court of four Judges with 
a well known affiliation with, and militancy for 
the governing political party, achieving a 
majority of votes in favor of the present 
government on all decisions made in this Forum, 
on an individual basis. The government went on 
repressing and eliminating student participation 
on the procedures of the State University, 
suppressing tuition exemption rights for 
outstanding athletes and artists, among others; 
forcing the students from all eleven campuses of 
the University of Puerto Rico to declare a strike 
that lasted 60 days, generating ample support 
from the people of Puerto Rico and around the world.

The students on strike were successful in 
achieving their demands through negotiations that 
involved a First Instance Court and an appointed 
negotiator; however, Secretary of government 
Rodr?guez Ema is trying to invalidate these 
accords, saying that they ?are not worth the paper in which they were written?

This event preceded the Central government?s 
action of proposing a hasty law, that was signed 
with no revision within hours, adding four 
additional members to the Board of trustees of 
the University of Puerto Rico. These additions to 
the Board are unconditional members of the 
governing political party The students of the 
State University, who in the great majority 
depend on Federal grants, now face an annual 
recurring fee of $800.00, which they will not be 
able to pay and that they will not pay, forcing 
the students to return to their strike. With this 
strategy, the Central government risks the 
accreditation of the State University and as a 
consequence, the government would be able to privatize its assets.

Following this same direction, the government of 
Puerto Rico will attempt to sell and to divide 
for speculation a strip of land where the Karst 
formation stands, on the northwest of the Island. 
This area collects one third of our water 
supplies for the entire population; nonetheless, 
the government intends to put this area into 
private hands that would build a toll expressway 
over this zone that is rich ecologically and economically.

Passing up many other events, the budget of 
Puerto Rico was approved, together with countless 
laws which favor privatization, the dissolving of 
professional associations and the distribution of 
public funds into private hands, without the 
pertaining and compulsory hearings of public 
participation, reaching the extreme of turning 
off the microphones of the opposing political 
party members, in a despotic fashion.

The events climaxed last week when the FBI in 
Puerto Rico arrested Senator H?ctor Mart?nez, 
NPP, on charges of bribe, the selling of 
influences and other charges. Martinez is 
Senator?s Rivera Schatz right hand in the Senate. 
A public squabble reached the news between the 
Senator and the FBI, with the Senator fending the 
alleged innocence of Senator Mart?nez, who has 
been directly associated with drug traffic and 
who was filmed while committing bribery.

Then, last in his many violent and reckless acts, 
the president of the Senate, Rivera Schatz, using 
force and a real padlock, censored the access of 
the cameras and the news media to the Senate 
sessions, depriving the People of Puerto Rico of 
direct information about the discussions and 
voting sessions that were taking place about this 
year?s budget and other matter). The events 
resulted in verbal and physical violence between 
senators, rising indignation among the people to 
a point of an almost unsustainable state of outrage and wrath.

Counselor Rivera Schatz has taken virtual control 
of the country with his tyrannical and fascist 
ways; and it cannot be discarded that from these 
same seats, this same week, acts of persecution 
and acts of violence will be started against 
other sectors of the People, all approved by the 
Secretary Governor of Puerto Rico.

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, 
groups of students, teachers and citizens asked 
for entry to the House of the Laws and they were 
struck and tortured by the Police, there are 
numerous injured people, while the National Guard 
is mobilized towards Capitol Hill. Violent shocks 
are scattered over the whole zone of the 
Parliament and the repression continues.

This factual deed of control of the political 
power from within the Puerto Rican Nation 
violates all elementary principles of democracy 
and of participation of the People in the 
government, for which we proclaim to the World 
the present situation of contained violence that 
exists in our People and that is about to explode 
against these two politicians that had taken by 
assault the power in our Country. Even though in 
Puerto Rico there are no conditions for an armed 
struggle of the People because of the obvious 
disparity of the opposing sides, a revolution of 
cultural and of student affirmation is starting 
to take the streets and to retrieve the spaces 
stolen away by the originators of this coup.

We exhort all communications media of the World 
to divulge and expose the current situation of 
the Puerto Rican Nation and we ask of you, therefore, your total solidarity.

- Composed by Roberto Ramos-Perea, Puertorrican 
playwrite. (With the active collaboration, 
comments and support of more than a hundred Puerto Rican citizens.)




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul  7 10:44:29 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:44:29 -0700
Subject: [News] Charging Wikileaks Source: The Nail in the Coffin of
 Whistblowers
Message-ID: <mailman.62.1278514733.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


Original Content at 
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Charging-Wikileaks-Source-by-Jesselyn-Radack-100707-862.html

----------
July 7, 2010

Charging Wikileaks Source: The Nail in the Coffin of Whistblowers

By Jesselyn Radack

Even the 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/06/AR2010070602330.html>Washington 
Post gets it. In its article on the criminal charges brought against 
Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, the sub-headline to 
the article reads:

U.S. TAKING TOUGH LINE ON LEAKS

The opening paragraph states that the military charging Bradley Manning

is likely to further deter would-be whistleblowers.

I don't care if it's Bush or Obama at the helm. The biggest crimes of 
our generation--torture, warrantless wiretapping, and extraordinary 
rendition--would not have come to light but for the unauthorized 
disclosure of classified information. For the hand-wringing "but we 
can't willy-nilly reveal classified information" crowd, do you think 
Abu Ghraib wasn't classified?
We are told (though there has been not a shred of evidence other than 
the government saying this, and even the charges do not reflect this 
number) that Manning gave some 250,000 classified State Department 
cables to Wikileaks.org. All we really KNOW is that the website 
published a horrific video of an American helicopter massacring 
unarmed Iraqi civilians, including children, and the shooters 
cheering on each other as if it were a video game.

And the former senior National Security Agency (NSA) official Thomas 
Drake? The party line is that he "leaked" classified material to a 
newspaper. If you read the indictment, he has really been indicted 
under the Espionage Act, a 93-year-old law meant to catch spies, for 
allegedly "retaining" classified information. What the government is 
really mad about is that an article appeared in the Baltimore Sun 
describing how and why the NSA opted for an billion-dollar, failed 
invasive surveillance program called "Trailblazer" over one that 
could more adequately collect intelligence information without 
violating people's privacy.

Short of killing someone (think Karen Silkwood, and more recently, of 
the "worldwide manhunt" for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange launched 
by the Pentagon), this is the worst, and increasingly popular, form 
of retaliation that can be taken against a whistleblower: criminal 
prosecution for revealing the truth--which in both the Manning and 
Drake cases did no harm to national security, but instead committed 
the far worse "crime" of embarrassing the government. In fact, both 
these men were trying to expose conduct they thought, and that was, illegal.

I urge you to "like" the 
<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Tom-Drake/128268337206799?v=wall>Save 
Tom Drake page on Facebook and to check out the 
<http://www.bradleymanning.org/>Help Bradley Manning website.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be 
in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
--James Madison

reprinted from <http://jesselyn-radack.dailykos.com/>Dailykos.com 
with author <http://jesselyn-radack.dailykos.com/>permission

Author's Website: http://www.patriotictruthteller.net

Author's Bio: My name is 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesselyn_Radack>Jesselyn Radack and I 
am the former Justice Department ethics attorney and whistleblower in 
the case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. In today's issue of 
The National Law Journal (Feb. 19, 2007), I have an Op-Ed entitled 
"Targeting Lawyers" on what it really looks like when the government 
tries to control attorneys acting on behalf of terrorism suspects 
and, if it cannot control them, punish them. I speak from personal 
experience in being blacklisted by this Administration.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul  7 14:12:52 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:12:52 -0700
Subject: [News] McChrystal Coverup of Special Forces Killings Excluded Key
 Eyewitnesses
Message-ID: <mailman.67.1278526387.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

http://www.counterpunch.org/porter07072010.html

July 7, 2010


"I Saw Them Taking the Bullets Out of the Body of My Daughter"


McChrystal Probe of Special Forces Killings Excluded Key Eyewitnesses

By GARETH PORTER and AHMAD WALID FAZLY

The follow-up investigation of a botched Special 
Operations Forces (SOF) raid in Gardez Feb. 12 
that killed two government officials and three 
women, ordered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal Apr. 
5, was ostensibly aimed at reconciling divergent 
Afghan and U.S. accounts of what happened during and after the raid.

That implied that the U.S. investigators would 
finally do what they had failed to do in the 
original investigation - interview the 
eyewitnesses. But three eyewitnesses who had 
claimed to see U.S. troops digging bullets of the 
bodies of three women told IPS they were never 
contacted by U.S. investigators.

The failure to interview key eyewitnesses, along 
with the refusal to make public any of the 
investigation's findings, continued a pattern of 
behaviour by McChrystal's command of denying that 
the SOF unit had begun a cover-up of the killings immediately after the raid.

Both the original report of the U.S. 
investigation and initial NATO report on the Feb. 
12 night raid in Gardez remain classified, 
according to Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the 
officer who was spokesman for McChrystal on the 
issue before the general was relieved of his command Jun. 23.

Casting further doubt on the integrity of the 
investigation, the officer who carried out the 
follow-up investigation was under McChrystal's 
direct command after completing the investigation.

As a member of the SOF community who had promoted 
night raids as a privileged tactic in his 
strategy in Afghanistan, McChrystal had an 
obvious personal and political interest in 
keeping evidence of an SOF cover-up of the 
killings out of any official U.S. report on the Gardez raid.

Even while claiming that he could not reveal 
anything about the conclusions of the report, 
Breasseale told IPS, "Based on the findings of 
this <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520250044/counterpunchmaga>
[]
investigation, I can reaffirm what I wrote on 5 
April - there is no evidence of a cover-up."

Breasseale had said in an e-mail to us before 
McChrystal was relieved of command that "many" 
survivors of the raid were interviewed, 
"depending on whether they were available to 
speak to the investigating officer".

But the father and mother of an 18-year-old girl 
who died from wounds inflicted by the raiders and 
the brother of the police officer and the 
prosecutor killed in the raid all said in 
interviews last week that they had never been 
contacted by U.S. investigators about what they 
had seen that night. All three gave testimony to the Afghan investigators.

In an interview, Mohammed Tahir, the father of 
Gulalai, the 18-year old girl who was killed in 
the raid, said, "I saw them taking out the 
bullets from bodies of my daughter and others."

Tahir said that he and as many as seven other 
eyewitnesses had told interior ministry 
investigators about the attempted cover-up they 
had seen. But he insisted, "We have never been 
interviewed by the U.S. military."

Mohammed Saber, the brother of the two men killed 
in the raid - Commander Dawood, the head of 
intelligence for a district in Paktia province, 
and Saranwal Zahir, a prosecutor - said he had 
not been interviewed by any U.S. investigator 
either. Saber told IPS, "The Americans were 
taking out the bullets from the bodies of the 
dead with knives and with other equipment that they always have."

Saber said the U.S. soldiers refused to let 
relatives of the victims go to help them as they 
lay bleeding to death. Saber said he and other 
eyewitnesses were taken to a U.S. base and 
detained for three nights and four days.

Sabz Paree, the 18-year-old woman's mother, also 
denied being interviewed by U.S. investigators. 
"I saw everything," she told IPS. "The Americans 
had knives and were taking out the bullets from her."

In response to a request for comment on the 
denials by the three family members that they or 
other eyewitnesses had been interviewed by the 
U.S. investigator, Breasseale wrote in an e-mail, 
"All available family members who offered 
themselves up to take part in the investigator's 
questions when he was there were interviewed during his visit(s)."

Breasseale said the name of the Army colonel in 
charge of the investigation would not be made 
public for reasons of "privacy". He acknowledged 
in an e-mail before McChrystal was relieved of 
duty, however, that the officer was under 
McChrystal's "operational control", although he 
was not at the time he was appointed and during the investigation.

The target of the raid was a young man who had 
been at the celebration at the compound but had 
not even been detained, according to Mohammed 
Saber, who was shown pictures of the target while 
being held in detention for four days. The man 
turned himself in for questioning a few days 
later but was then released without charge, according to Saber.

The International Security Assistance Force 
(ISAF), the combined U.S.-NATO command then 
headed by McChrystal, issued a statement within 
hours of the Feb. 12 raid declaring that the two 
men who died in the raid were "insurgents" who 
had fired on the raiding party, and that the 
troops had found the bodies of three women "tied 
up, gagged and killed" and hidden in a room.

Military officials later suggested that the women 
- who among them had 16 children - had all been 
stabbed to death or had died by other means before the raid.

The officials told reporters the bodies had shown 
signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a 
knife ? a claim that appears to support the 
eyewitness accounts by family members of the use 
of knives by SOF members to dig bullets out of the dead bodies.

The New York Times quoted a family member, Abdul 
Ghafar, as recalling that he had seen bullet 
entry wounds on the bodies of the three dead 
women that appeared to have been scraped out to 
remove bullets. "The holes were bigger than they 
were supposed to be," Gafar was quoted as saying.

When Jerome Starkey of The Times of London 
reported Mar. 13 that more than a dozen people 
interviewed at or near the scene of the attack 
had said the three women were killed by the 
U.S.-NATO gunmen, McChrystal's spokesman, Rear 
Adm. Gregory Smith, tried to challenge the accuracy of Starkey's reporting.

On Apr. 4, ISAF admitted for the first time that 
the woman had been killed as a result of the SOF 
raiders firing on the two men.

However, the ISAF statement suggested that the 
U.S. and Afghan investigators had conducted a 
"thorough joint investigation" and maintained 
that there was no evidence of a cover-up. It 
explained the earlier statement about the women 
being found bound and gagged as the result of "an 
initial report by the international members of 
the joint force who were not familiar with Islamic burial customs".

But the head of the Afghan Interior Ministry's 
Criminal Investigation Department, Mirza Mohammed 
Yarmand, publicly contradicted to the ISAF 
statement, telling the New York Times Apr. 4 that 
his investigators had gotten eyewitness accounts 
from survivors of tampering with the bodies of the dead.

Yarmand told the Times that his investigation had 
concluded that "there was evidence of tampering 
in the corridor inside the compound by the members" of the SOF raiding unit.

Within 24 hours of the publication of Yarmand's 
revelations, McChrystal's spokesman was telling 
reporters that McChrystal had ordered a new U.S. 
investigation, even as he was continuing to deny 
that there any evidence of SOF tampering with the evidence.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and 
journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising 
in U.S. national security policy. The paperback 
edition of his latest book, 
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520250044/counterpunchmaga>Perils 
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to 
War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Ahmad Walid Fazly reported from Kabul.




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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul  7 19:15:08 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:15:08 -0700
Subject: [News] Activists found not guilty for decommissioning weapons
	factory
Message-ID: <mailman.79.1278544521.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Activists found not guilty for decommissioning weapons factory

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11367.shtml
Chloe Marsh, The Electronic Intifada, 7 July 2010



Seven anti-war activists on trial for entering a 
Brighton weapons factory and "decommissioning" it 
were found unanimously "not guilty" last week.

On 16 January 2009, in the midst of Israel's 
relentless bombing of Gaza, six of the defendants 
broke into the premises of EDO MBM, a supplier of 
weapons components. According to one of the 
defendants, Elijah Smith, they "set out to smash 
it up to the best of our abilities." Two 
activists who supported them outside the factory 
gates were also put on trial for "conspiracy to cause criminal damage"

It was an entirely accountable action which was 
always intended to end in a trial and each 
decommissioner had pre-recorded a video in which 
they stated the reasons for their participation 
-- to help dismantle the war machine from the factory floor.

Once inside the building, the six barricaded 
themselves in and set to work; equipment used to 
make weapon components was trashed and computers, 
filing cabinets and office furnishings were 
thrown out of the windows. Once they were done 
they calmly waited for the police to arrest them. 
All of the defendants have argued that what they 
did was not only morally necessary but crucially, 
that it was legal. UK law allows the commission 
of damage of property to prevent greater crimes.

Two of the accused, Simon Levin and Chris Osmond, 
have extensive experience of working in Palestine 
with the International Solidarity Movement. Chris 
Osmond told the court that "the humanitarian 
disaster unfolding in Gaza at that time meant it 
was imperative to act." He cited the words of 
Rachel Corrie, the US activist who was killed in 
2003 by an Israeli soldier operating a bulldozer 
in Gaza, as an inspiration. The court heard a 
passage of Corrie's diary in which she wrote: 
"I'm witnessing this chronic insidious genocide 
and I'm really scared. This has to stop; I think 
it is a good idea idea for all of us to drop 
everything and devote our lives to making this stop."

During the trial the court heard not only from 
the defendants themselves but from Sharyn Lock, a 
human rights volunteer who was in Gaza during the 
winter 2008-09 attacks. She was inside al-Quds 
hospital in Gaza City when it was attacked with 
white phosphorus. She concluded her evidence by 
saying that she had no doubt that those who armed 
the Israeli Air Force "had the blood of children 
on their hands." The jury saw footage of the air 
attacks on the UN agency for Palestine refugees 
(UNRWA) compound where civilians were sheltering 
and have been given an edited version of the Goldstone report.

Recently-elected member of parliament for the 
local area, Caroline Lucas also gave evidence 
supporting the activists, saying that the 
democratic process "had been exhausted" as far as the factory was concerned.

On 17 January 2009 the bombs had already fallen 
relentlessly on Gaza for three weeks. Massive, 
passionate demonstrations and pickets had been 
held in many cities around the country and the 
world in protest against Israel's war crimes, but 
to no avail. A growing sense of helplessness was 
grabbing hold of the movement as the Palestinian 
body count stood at more than 1,400 and counting. 
Three hundred of the dead were children. It was 
in this context that the "citizens' decommissioning" of EDO MBM/ITT took place.

The arms manufacturer EDO/ITT has been based in 
Brighton since 1946. Acquired along with the rest 
of EDO Corporation by the multinational arms 
conglomerate ITT in December 2007, the company's 
primary business is the manufacture of weapons 
systems such as bomb release mechanisms and bomb 
racks. Crucially, this includes the manufacture 
of the VER-2 Zero Retention Force Arming Unit for 
the Israeli Air Force's F16 war planes.

Over the years EDO has consistently denied 
supplying Israel, and despite more than fifty 
court cases campaigners have not been able to 
properly expose the links between the factory and 
the IAF. However the serious nature of the 
charges against the eight activists (the factory 
sustained nearly ?200,000 -- or $301,600 -- of 
damage and may not have recommenced production 
for weeks) means that for the first time courts 
are taking seriously the argument that EDO's business is fundamentally illegal.

Paul Hills, the managing director of EDO MBM, 
spent his five days on the witness stand at the 
beginning of the trial being confronted with all 
the evidence gathered by campaigners over the 
years exposing a complex network of collaboration 
between British, American and Israeli arms 
companies and the way in which their deals are 
clouded in secrecy. The activists on trial were 
able to present Hills, for the first time, with a 
dossier of evidence showing how EDO MBM uses a 
front company in the US to indirectly supply 
components for F-16 aircraft to Israel. Under UK 
law the supply of weapons components that might 
be used in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip is actually a crime.

After hearing Hills' explanations of his 
company's business practices, Judge George 
Bathurst-Norman said that despite Hill's denials 
of dealing with Israel, it was clear that there 
was enough evidence to justify a genuinely-held 
belief that they did. He also offered the opinion 
that End User Certificates required for arms 
export licenses were "not worth the paper they 
are written on" as they can be easily manipulated.

There is a history of juries in British courts 
finding anti-war activists not guilty when they 
attack machinery used in war crimes. In 1996 four 
women from Trident Ploughshares decommissioned a 
Hawk jet that was about to be shipped to 
Indonesia -- they were found not guilty. In 2008 
the Raytheon 9, who damaged a factory in Derry 
supplying weapons to Israel during the 2006 
Lebanon war, were acquitted by a jury and only 
two weeks ago a group of nine women carrying out 
a similar action at Raytheon during the Gaza 
attacks were also found not guilty by an unanimous jury.

The not guilty verdicts handed down by a jury of 
randomly selected members of the public, will 
make it clear to companies like EDO that not only 
is there a growing number of people who are 
willing to risk their own liberty to stand up for 
the people of Gaza and to challenge Israel's war 
crimes through whatever means possible, but that 
public opinion in the UK is hardening against Israel.

Chloe Marsh is a long-term peace campaigner and 
activist. She has been involved in campaigning 
against the arms trade for many years and 
opposing the illegal wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan, and she's also worked with the 
International Solidarity Movement in Palestine. 
Smash EDO has been campaigning for the closure of 
EDO MBM/ITT for six years. To get involved, 
visit: <http://www.smashedo.org.uk/>www.smashedo.org.uk



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul  8 15:59:40 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:59:40 -0700
Subject: [News] Remembering Lumumba
Message-ID: <mailman.99.1278619201.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Remembering Lumumba



Mwaura Kaara
2010-07-08, Issue <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/489>489

<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/65781>http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/65781


As the DRC commemorates 50 years of independence, 
Mwaura Kaara finds there?s little official 
acknowledgement of the life of Patrice Lumumba, 
Congo?s first and only elected prime minister, 
removed from office after two months and 
eventually assassinated. The celebration ?should 
have reflected on Lumumba?s main contribution to 
the Congolese struggle?, writes Kaara, ?his 
articulation of the idea of a united Congo, a 
vision that sought to build a united nations 
across all ethnic and tribal divisions despite fierce European opposition.?

On 17 January 1961 Patrice Lumumba, the 
charismatic first and only elected prime minister 
of Congo, was brutally murdered. The 
circumstances of his death remain a mystery, the 
identity of his killers unknown.

In 1956 Lumumba was a post office clerk; four 
years later he would be prime minister. In 
between he had been an ??volu?? ? one of Congo's 
tiny black middle class, a beer salesman and a 
prisoner, twice for his political motivation.

His imprisonment radicalised him and by 1958 he 
had co-founded a political party, the National 
Congolese Movement, the MNC that was distinctively pan-Africanist.

Independence Day was celebrated on 30 June in a 
ceremony attended by many dignitaries including 
King Baudouin and the foreign dignitaries and 
press. Patrice Lumumba delivered his famous 
independence speech after being officially 
excluded from the event programme, despite being 
the new prime minister. The speech of King 
Baudouin praised developments under colonialism, 
his reference to the ?genius? of his great 
grand-uncle Leopold II of Belgium glossing over 
atrocities committed during the Congo Free State.

The King continued, ?Don't compromise the future 
with hasty reforms, and don't replace the 
structures that Belgium hands over to you until 
you are sure you can do better... Don't be afraid 
to come to us. We will remain by your side, give you advice.?

In his speech, addressed directly to Belgium?s 
monarch and ministers, Lumumba reclaimed the 
history and dignity of the Congolese people in 
their decades-long struggle for independence:

?For this independence of the Congo 
 no 
Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to 
forget that it was by fighting that it has been 
won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic 
fight, a fight in which we were spared neither 
privation nor suffering, and for which we gave 
our strength and our blood 
 We are proud of this 
struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the 
depths of our being, for it was a noble and just 
struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the 
humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.?

Lumumba was prime minister for only about two 
months before he was removed illegally from 
office and eventually killed. This occurred under 
the auspices and coordination of a section of the 
United Nations loyal to the Belgian government, 
the Belgian authorities and the US Central Intelligence Agency.

On 11 July 1960, the resource-rich Katanga 
province announced it was seceding under the 
leadership of Moise Tshombe. Belgium?s troops 
promptly entered in support. This move provoked a 
wave of international outrage, in particular 
criticism by the socialist bloc, spearheaded by 
the Soviet Union, and the decolonising nations in 
Africa and Asia. The Belgians withdrew in favour 
of UN troops, but the UN did not nullify 
Tshombe?s secession. Prime Minister Lumumba 
appealed to the UN and United States, but the 
imperialist powers turned a deaf ear to the new 
African leader. He turned to the Soviet Union, 
which provided loyal forces with aid and 
transported troops to help end the secession.

On 5 September, the pro-imperialist president, 
Kasavubu, illegally removed Lumumba from office. 
Lumumba brought his case directly to the 
parliament, which reaffirmed his post. In 
response, Kasavubu dismissed the parliament.

UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjold publicly 
endorsed Kasavubu?s move. A section of the UN 
forces loyal to the Belgian government had 
earlier hampered Lumumba by closing a radio 
station he was using to plead his case with the 
people. Amid the struggle, Colonel Joseph Mobutu 
took power in a CIA-backed coup d??tat on the 
side of Kasavubu and the United States. Lumumba 
was placed under house arrest, ?protected? by UN 
troops actively intervening against his rule.

Lumumba understood that the UN was acting as the 
armed forces of the Western imperialist powers. 
Rather than stay under house arrest, he decided 
to flee. As he was fleeing, he was captured by 
Mobutu?s forces on 1 December 1960. Mobutu handed 
over Lumumba to the secessionist Tshombe, who had 
him executed on the very night of his capture. 
The whole capture by Mobutu and turnover to 
Tshombe was orchestrated by Belgian authorities 
with the full knowledge and aid of the CIA.

Mobutu gained in power under the new government, 
eventually ruling as a brutal dictator with the 
support of US imperialism until he was ousted in 1997.

This year, the Democratic Republic of Congo has 
celebrated 50 years of independence, and amidst 
the noise and cacophony, the name of one of 
Africa?s greatest ancestor and his significant 
contributions to the African liberation movement has gone silent.

The meaning of the life and the work of Patrice 
Lumumba was rooted in his determination to fight 
against the forces of domination and oppression, 
that were represented by the European world in 
the most turbulent period of the history of the 
Congo, and as such as the Democratic Republic of 
Congo held festivities to mark 50 years of 
independence and symbolically usher in a new era 
breathing in new ethos and values, focus should 
have been to reflect on the steadfast efforts of 
Lumumba in his quest for the real movement of the people of Africa.

The celebration should have been to reflect on 
Lumumba?s main contribution to the Congolese 
struggle, his articulation of the idea of a 
united Congo, a vision that sought to build a 
united nations across all ethnic and tribal 
divisions despite fierce European opposition. A 
vision that paralleled his Pan-African sentiment 
of African unity, both ideals that were 
unacceptable to the imperialist powers, which 
sought a Congo and Africa riven with internal 
strife in order to be held in submission.

As the political elite in the Democratic Republic 
of Congo continue to suffer from the hangover of 
toasting with their Belgian masters, after their 
heavy indulgence, and celebrations marked by the 
entertainment parading of their poverty-stricken 
populace, who could not comprehend what was 
happening, let us reflect on and walk the legacy 
of Patrice Lumumba. A legacy reflected in the 
pan-African aims, institutions and policies of 
the African Union and in the guiding ethos behind 
the adoption of the Ezulwini Consensus, which 
proposes a permanent African seat in a reformed 
United Nations Security Council.

His ability to evoke so powerfully the extent of 
his people?s subjugation, derived from a rare 
understanding of the inherent duplicity of the 
colonial discourse. As Jean Van Lierde put it:

?He was the only Congolese leader who rose above 
the ethnic difficulties and tribal preoccupations 
that destroyed all the other parties. Lumumba was the first real pan-African.?

Shortly before his assassination, Lumumba penned 
the following words in a farewell letter: ?The 
only thing we wanted for our country was the 
right to a decent existence, to dignity without 
hypocrisy, to independence without 
restrictions... The day will come when history will have its say.?

In conclusion, we can say that the external 
enemies, (or the enemies from without), and 
internal enemies (or the enemies from within), 
led to the demise and death of Patrice Lumumba. 
But, fortunately, his legacy lives on.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Mwaura Kaara is the youth focal point at United 
Nations Millennium Campaign, Africa.
* Please send comments to 
<mailto:editor at pambazuka.org>editor at pambazuka.org 
or comment online at <http://www.pambazuka.org/>Pambazuka News.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  9 12:41:54 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:41:54 -0700
Subject: [News] Confronting Rendition to Torture in North Carolina
Message-ID: <mailman.106.1278693722.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Confronting Rendition to Torture in North Carolina

By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/clarehanrahan>Clare Hanrahan

Source: WarIsACrime.org
http://www.zcommunications.org/confronting-rendition-to-torture-in-north-carolina-by-clare-hanrahan
Friday, July 09, 2010


Despite what our leaders may profess, U.S. 
directed torture continues and efforts to obtain 
redress for victims and accountability from 
perpetrators are met with systematic obstruction. 
We know we cannot rely on government, at any 
level, to take the initiative for accountability.

But we must not be bystanders.

Six years have passed since the release of the 
gruesome photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, and it 
is well past the deadline President Obama set for 
closing the prison camps at Guantanamo. Yet this 
Administration has steadfastly refused to seek 
accountability for U.S.-sponsored torture?the 
murderous extent of which is still being 
revealed?and invokes the ?state secrets? 
privilege to obstruct prosecution when torture 
victims, some released without charge, seek legal redress.

These issues are never easy to confront. They 
require us to break through our denial, take in 
the horror, and hold it in awareness while we organize for action.

In a 2006 report, The Parliamentary Assembly of 
the Council of Europe (PACE) accused the United 
States of operating a ?clandestine ?spiderweb? of 
disappearances, secret detentions and unlawful 
inter-state transfers, often encompassing 
countries notorious for their use of torture. 
Hundreds of persons have become entrapped in this 
web?some merely suspected of sympathizing with a 
presumed terrorist organization.?

In North Carolina, a tenacious grassroots 
coalition of peace and human rights activists, 
religious groups, and courageous locals has 
organized as NC Stop Torture Now (NC-STN). 
According to the group, ?Officials of the Bush 
Administration used North Carolina as a key part 
of their secret off-shore torture program.? The 
?torture taxi? planes were based in Johnston and 
Lenoir counties. Their pilots and crews work for 
Aero Contractors, a CIA linked company 
headquartered at the Johnston County airport in 
Smithfield, a town of less than 12,000 persons 
situated in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina about 30 miles east of Raleigh.

NC Stop Torture Now has been campaigning since 
2005 at local, state, and federal levels for an 
end to the practice of extraordinary rendition to 
torture and for an investigation of Aero 
Contractors. They act boldly and deftly to 
educate the public and state officials. They seek 
acknowledgment and accountability for the crimes, 
apology and restitution for torture survivors, 
and assurance that state and national resources 
will never again be used to secretly disappear 
people and torture them, whether they are guilty of crimes or not.

The U.N. Convention against Torture, ratified by 
the U.S.in 1994, requires in Article III: ?No 
state shall expel, return or extradite a person 
to another state where there are substantial 
grounds for believing that he would be in danger 
of being subjected to torture.? Failure to 
prosecute violations is considered a breach of 
international law. North Carolina law requires 
anyone in charge of a state agency, such as the 
Global TransPark where Aero maintained a hangar 
in Kinston, to report possible criminal 
violations to the State Bureau of Investigation.

NC-STN was pivotal in organizing a public 
conference, ?Weaving a Net of Accountability: 
Taking on Extraordinary Rendition at the State 
and Regional Level,? held April 8-9 at Duke 
University. Speakers came from Ireland, London, 
New York, Washington, Boston, and from throughout North Carolina.

?It is clear that our public taxpayer-funded 
airports are systematically being used by the CIA 
for purposes that may in fact still include 
extraordinary rendition,? said Christina Cowger, 
a conference organizer and facilitator with 
NC-STN. Aero Contractors was founded in 1979 in 
the wake of the dismantling of Air America, the 
CIA airline that participated heavily in the Indo-China wars, she said.

?It was actually the St. Louis folks who woke us 
up to the fact that we had this CIA operation in 
our backyard,? Cowger acknowledged. A delegation 
from St. Louis including longtime human rights 
activist and war-tax resister Bill Ramsey and his 
friend, Andrew Wimmer, traveled to North Carolina in November 2005.

The group joined with local members of NC-STN and 
served a peoples? indictment to Aero Contractors, 
charging them with multiple counts of violation 
of U.S. and international laws and treaties 
banning torture by providing pilots and planes 
for the CIA?s program of extraordinary rendition. 
The citizen action resulted in 14 arrests?not of 
the officials who are complicit in rendition to 
torture, but of the activists who came to seek accountability.

Wimmer was working then with the St. Louis-based 
Center for Theology and Social Analysis. His 
research on extraordinary rendition led to Global 
TransPark, a public-private consortium built by 
the state of North Carolina with economic development funds.

According to Cowger, UK journalist Stephen Grey 
used flight logs from the FAA and Eurocontrol 
(the FAA?s counterpart in Europe) to piece 
together the itineraries of the two main 
rendition planes, the Kinston-based N313P and the 
smaller Gulfstream, N379P, which was based at the 
Johnston County airport. Tail numbers have since 
been changed. A Montana-registered Gulfstream IV 
aircraft, with tail number N478GS, operated by 
Centurian Aviation, was based at the Fayetteville 
Airport, and is suspected of facilitating the 
extraordinary rendition program, according to 
Cowger, as an arm of the Joint Special Operations 
Command (JSOC), based at Fort Bragg.

?The point is really a simple one,? said Robin 
Kirk, director of the Human Rights Center at Duke 
University, in introducing Gavin Simpson, lead 
investigator with the Council of Europe and 
conference presenter. ?We are trying to do 
something about human rights abuse, extraordinary 
rendition, and the torture that came along with 
it that has its feet in our state
to get around 
the impunity that seems to be reigning right now 
with regard to human rights issues.?

The Council of Europe serves its 46 member states 
as ?the guardian for human rights, democracy, and 
respect for the rule of law in Europe,? using as 
its reference point the European Convention on Human Rights.

Aero Contractors was the aviation ?hub? of the 
CIA?s rendition program, which ?flew dozens of 
people to horrific jails around the globe, using 
?civilian? aircraft,? according to NC Stop 
Torture Now. The group has compiled a partial 
list of twenty-four detainees secretly 
transported by Aero Contractors for torture by or 
for the CIA, citing as a primary source the book Ghost Plane by Stephen Grey.

The pickup methodology for the CIA?s torture 
rendition flights was ?alarmingly systematized,? 
said Simpson, who has followed the gruesome trail 
of so-called ?extraordinary rendition? throughout 
Europe. ?It involved stripping the suspect naked, 
often roughly beating him around the midriff and 
the ribs in the process. Men clad in ninja suits, 
black balaclavas, tight fitting black 
coats?unidentifiable from one another and without 
speaking a single word?would then put this person 
through a process of shackling, handcuffing
.? 
Simpson said that the captors would administer 
sedatives, often via the rectum, and blindfold, 
earmuff, goggle, and hood the captives. They 
would place the prisoners in adult diapers, and 
then put them in jumpsuits or other rudimentary 
clothing. Finally they were ?bundled onto a 
rendition aircraft, shackled to the ground or a 
gurney, sometimes given further sedatives so that 
they wouldn?t experience the flight, and then 
flown to a fate and a destination unknown.?

?Aero Contractors personnel on the aircraft were 
the ones who actually operated the rendition 
circuits. Without their personal participation, 
none of this would have been possible. They were 
the pilots in command. They were the support 
crew. They were the persons who held the controls 
of the aircraft and navigated them to landings at 
the black sites air [fields] with detainees bound 
and shackled in the back. Aero personnel were 
part of the systematic cover-up. For example, the 
pilots in command knowingly deviated from 
registered flight plans, willfully therefore 
violating the regulations of international 
aviation law and assuring that their operations 
could not be traced contemporaneously and have 
been mighty hard to track retrospectively,? Simpson said.

Aero Contractors employed about 80 persons toward 
the start of the Bush war on terror. Now it?s up 
to about 130 employees. ?We are under no illusion 
that people like these are the authors of the 
policy. They are the foot soldiers,? Cowger 
asserted. ?These people live and work in Johnston 
County in comfortable middle class houses.?

In May 2010, the Attorney General of Spain 
requested that a Spanish judge issue arrest 
warrants for 13 U.S. citizens who helped kidnap 
and disappear German citizen Khaled el-Masri as 
part of the Bush Administration?s program of 
extraordinary rendition. At least three of the 
U.S. citizens are pilots employed by Aero Contractors.

Allyson Caison, a Johnston County-based real 
estate broker, has been involved in NC-STN since 
its inception. ?When in 2005 we got a notice that 
the folks from St. Louis were coming and were 
going to tell us what the CIA was doing,? the 
former PTA president told the assembly, ?I went 
to the meeting to see what was going on.? Caison 
says she was shocked to find that the people 
involved with Aero Contractors were ?the pillars 
of our community...very well-enmeshed in society. 
So in speaking out against them, we are not 
speaking out against some abstract person; we?re 
speaking out against our neighbors.?

Confronting these issues is not easy. It takes 
courage. It takes persistence. It takes fortitude.

But we must not be bystanders.

Chuck Fager, director of Quaker House, in 
Fayetteville, NC, is active with NC-STN in their 
persistent lobbying efforts before the Johnston 
County Board of Commissioners.?They are all 
Republicans and the ones up for re-election are 
running unopposed,? he said at the Duke 
conference. ?After 14 months or so, we are 
establishing a relationship with these 
commissioners
month after month after month we go 
back. Building these types of connections is very important.?

Fager and I later talked about how difficult it 
is to face up to the issue of U.S. directed 
torture. ?All the dots connected in my back 
yard,? he said. ?It?s like waking up one morning 
and realizing you live next to SS headquarters.?

Recalling the June 2006 Quaker conference on 
torture held in Greensboro, NC, he admitted that 
listening was ?very hard. It made me shake. I 
couldn?t sleep very well. I moved to a different 
level
my ability to keep it [torture] far away 
has been eroded. The levels of denial are really deep.?

Robin Kirk, in her opening remarks at the 
conference said, ?We have to do this work where 
we live. We have to do this
to show our neighbors 
and colleagues and school teachers and grocery 
clerks and businessmen and soldiers, why human 
rights matter.? Kirk spent years working in Peru 
and Colombia documenting human rights abuses, and 
authored several reports for Human Rights Watch.

In his keynote address, Scott Horton, a 
contributing editor with Harper?s Magazine, 
detailed some of the findings of his 
investigation of the sudden and violent deaths of 
three prisoners at Camp Delta?the 
?extra-constitutional? prison camp at Guantanamo 
Naval Base. In a March 2010 Harper?s Magazine 
report, Horton wrote of evidence ?that suggests 
the current administration failed to investigate 
seriously?and may even have continued?a cover-up 
of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006.?

?When the last prisoner is departed from that 
area of the American enclave on the island of 
Cuba, the book on Guantanamo is going to be far 
from closed,? Horton told the Duke assembly that 
drew about 120 people throughout the weekend. 
?Most of the legacy of Guantanamo remains in 
place, untouched, and there is as yet no real 
basis to assume there will be any kind of 
accountability,? he said. ?Ideas linked to 
Guantanamo are being woven into the fabric of our 
national security state. These transformations 
are going on in the policy background in 
Washington with surprisingly little attention.?

And the horrid revelations continue.

Stephen Soldz, a co-founder of the Coalition for 
an Ethical Psychology, which has made 
international news with its campaign to challenge 
the participation of leaders in the American 
Psychological Association in interrogation and 
torture, provided the Duke conference with 
insight into the psychology of denial and 
accountability. Soldz is president-elect of 
Psychologists for Social Responsibility and 
coauthor of a report just released by Physicians 
for Human Rights. The report, ?Experiments in 
Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and 
Experimentation in the ?Enhanced? Interrogation 
Program,? he contends, ?confirms previous 
suspicions and provides the first strong evidence 
that the CIA was indeed engaged in illegal and 
unethical research on detainees in its custody.?

Steve Watt, senior staff attorney with the ACLU 
Human Rights Program, spoke of the ongoing legal 
challenges to the CIA?s extraordinary rendition 
program. Noting the ?significant legal 
impediments? to obtaining judicial remedy, he 
said ?It is all but certain that a fully-fledged 
trial of a lawsuit brought by rendition survivors 
is many, many years away.? With a nod to NC-STN 
activist Peggy Misch, Watt told the Duke 
conference ?NC Stop Torture Now is one of the 
most innovative and creative grassroots groups 
working on torture in this country.?

Just prior to the Duke conference, Dr. Edward 
Horgan, a former Irish Defence Forces officer and 
co-founder of Shannon Watch, had his 10-year visa 
revoked by the U.S. State Department. After much 
pressure in the Irish press and from U.S. allies, 
including Veterans for Peace, at the last minute 
Dr. Horgan, who is also the International 
Secretary of the Irish Peace and Neutrality 
Alliance, was allowed travel to the U.S.

Ireland has been a neutral state since its 
inception, Horgan told the assembly. Over one 
million U.S. troops have passed through Shannon 
since 2002. ?Three plane loads a day, at least, 
each bringing about 200 troops?so 500 or 600 
armed troops pass through Shannon airport every 
day of the week, every day of the year, in gross 
violation of international law on neutrality.?

?Clearly torture is a serious crime. But it is 
connected with the two wars [Afghanistan and 
Iraq],? Horgan continued. ?By torturing somebody 
you are removing some of their human rights, 
albeit very seriously and very grossly. By 
killing somebody you are removing all of their 
human rights. You are removing their very 
existence. Killing or causing the deaths, 
directly or indirectly, of one million people, 
and killing 200,000 children, or causing their 
deaths, [in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan] is 
absolutely a gross crime against humanity, regardless of who does it.?

?Kidnap, rendition and torture of U.S. enemies is 
now being replaced with extra-judicial killings 
and assassinations of U.S. enemies. Collateral 
damage, including the killing of thousands of 
innocent foreign civilians, is now acceptable to 
the U.S.,? Horgan said. ?Obama has ordered a 
dramatic increase in the U.S. drone attacks. 

These extrajudicial killings are being passed 
off as being part of the war on terror, a 
necessary evil. But killing someone, 
extra-judicially or otherwise, but unjustifiably, 
is even a more serious crime than torture.?

?I can speak all you want about all the bad 
things that have happened to myself and others,? 
Bisher al-Rawi told the assembly, speaking on 
live video from his home in London. Al-Rawi was 
imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured at two 
separate CIA facilities in Afghanistan, then 
transferred, via Aero Contractors, to Guantanamo 
in 2003 and released without charges in 2007. 
?Whether beatings, the pains, or the shivering 
cold, or people screaming because nobody is 
giving them the medication, or people screaming 
because they are being beaten up, whatever, I can 
go on with all of that. But I think, on top of 
that, we should look to the future, we should 
look at how we can actually do something positive 
to build these lives, these lives that have been 
destroyed
 I take this very close to my heart and 
I have decided this is really my work in life for 
the time being, until the time when we no longer 
have to speak about these things. 
I hope that will happen before too long.?

But we must not be bystanders.

##

Clare Hanrahan is a contributing editor to War 
Crimes Times, an associate member of Veterans For 
Peace Chapter 099, member of the National War Tax 
Resistance Coordinating Committee, and an organizer with WRL Asheville.




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522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  9 12:45:21 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:45:21 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Argentina=2C_Maradona=2C_World_Cup=3A_It=92?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?s_More__Than_Football?=
Message-ID: <mailman.111.1278693926.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Argentina, Maradona, World Cup: It?s More Than Football

By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/supriyochatterjee>Supriyo Chatterjee
http://www.zcommunications.org/argentina-maradona-world-cup-it-s-more-than-football-by-supriyo-chatterjee

Friday, July 09, 2010

The four German goals that destroyed Argentina?s 
dream of winning the football World Cup this year 
rekindled another: that of the Argentine Right 
and its sinister pointsman, Mauricio Macri. The 
real target of the Argentine Right and its 
allied  ?media generals?, as President Cristina 
Fern?ndes calls them, is Diego Maradona, revered 
in Argentina for his football achievements and 
for his political journey to the Left.

Maradona has since resigned as the team?s 
technical director and the Clar?n, the 
unforgiving Right-wing rag, started ripping into 
him. However, the people turned up in thousands 
to cheer the return of the defeated team with two 
slogans to chill the Right's ardour. The first, 
'he who does not jump is English', was a 
throwback to the celebrations of the 1986 victory 
over England in which Maradona entered 
Argentinean legend as a cheeky devil with his 
first, handball goal and as a demi-god with his 
second solo effort, accepted by most people as 
the best World Cup goal. It was seen as revenge 
for defeat in the Malvinas. The second rallying 
cry, 'uh-ah, Maradona no se va' (Maradona's not 
going away), was borrowed from the Venezuelan 
Ch?vez supporters, of whom Maradona is one.

The President invited the team to the 
presidential palace. The team led by Maradona 
said they were not worthy of the honour. Holding 
back her tears, Cristina Fern?ndes said they were 
mistaken, they were indeed worthy of it. All this 
might seem melodramatic to outsiders but 
Argentineans live and breathe the game. What 
Eduardo Galeano said of the Uruguayans holds true 
of the neighbouring Argentineans, that they are 
suckers for the beautiful game and are born 
shouting goooaaal. As it happens, Clar?n's owner 
was away from the country when the team returned, 
reportedly in the USA, escaping it seems from the 
revelation that her sons were adopted during the 
military dictatorship (1976-1983), brothers whose 
parents were murdered by the military regime. 
President Fern?ndez forced the Argentine Football 
Association to make sure that the World Cup 
matches were accessible to all rather than the 
pay-per-game scheme which would have translated 
into millions of dollars in profit for the Clarin 
media group. Ever since, they have had the 
President and the "golden kid" in their sights.

Mauricio Macri's father, who established himself 
as a fabulously wealthy businessman, made most of 
his money during the dictatorship years. Mauricio 
apparently decided to take to politics while he 
was briefly kidnapped and held for ransom by a 
group of policemen. His family is said to have 
paid a huge fortune for his release. Mauricio 
took over the Boca Juniors football club, where 
Maradona made his name as a precocious youngster 
and a senior player who would not go to the 
rival, well-heeled River Plate for more money. 
Mauricio stabilised the club and this paid him 
political dividends. He was elected Mayor of 
Buenos Aires with most votes coming not only from 
the fashionable neighbourhoods but also the 
poorer parts where most Boca supporters live. As 
the Buenos Aires Mayor, Macri has given early 
hint of what his rule could be like. He has 
unleashed violent police crackdown on 
demonstrations, spied on his rivals and 
colleagues using the capital's notorious police 
force, brought in ex-FBI advisors for them, stood 
by wealthy residents who tried to erect walls to 
keep out the poor from sight, and recently 
admitted that he made some appointments based on 
advice from the CIA and Mossad. Maradona?s Left 
turn imperils the Macri project of becoming 
Argentina's next President on the lines of 
Chile's billionaire President Pi?era. Diego has 
defended Cristina Fern?ndes, who lacks her 
husband, the former President Nestor Kirchner's popularity.

World Cups hold bittersweet memories for 
Argentineans. The 1986 victory in Mexico gave 
them Maradona. The first time they held the Jules 
Rimet trophy was in 1978. The country was then 
ruled by a military dictatorship and dissidents 
were being held and killed a thousand metres away 
from the main stadium. The River Plate stadium 
was being used as a clandestine holding centre. 
Even today, a bad football game in the continent 
is known as a ?Pinochet?, filling up a football 
stadium for a horror show. Argentina's Dutch 
rivals in the finals were advised not to go. They 
and the others did and the military used the 
victory for its counter-human rights campaign 
with the slogan, ?Argentineans are right and 
human?. General Jorge Rafael Videla, the 
architect of the dirty war, is on trial now. His 
policy of making people "disappear" (the 
disappeared were neither dead nor living, he 
clarified at his first trial, they had merely 
dis-a-ppeared) has become a template for the 
coupsters of Latin America. The Dutch crown 
princess, born M?xima Zorreguieta in Buenos 
Aires, is the daughter of the Agriculture 
Minister during the dictatorship and holds dual Dutch-Argentinean citizenship.

In 1978, Juan then 22, was transferred together 
with 15 other political prisoners from the Sierra 
Chica jail to the concentration camp of La Perla 
in C?rdoba as hostages to be executed if 
guerrillas committed any attack during the World 
Cup. That group of 16 was kept for the period of 
the championship handcuffed behind their back, 
blindfolded, seated on the floor against the wall 
but with a rare privilege: if Argentina played, 
their guards handcuffed them in front so they 
could celebrate and wave them about when the team 
scored (which they heard over the radio). In June 
1978, Ernesto, then 23 and political prisoner in 
Magdelana jail, was taken out of his cell during 
the night, beaten to pulp with sticks, made to 
bath in freezing water and put through several 
mock executions and later thrown into a 
punishment cell where he stayed squatting for ten 
days because it was too small for him to stand 
up. From that cell, Ernesto heard the cheers of 
the hangmen each time that Mario Kempes tore 
through the other team. Ernesto also celebrated 
but sensed that each Argentine goal could prolong 
his captivity. It was only years later that they 
saw the famous photos of the military junta 
celebrating the title in the palace and 
remembered those goals that they celebrated, and 
suffered, in the darkness of their dungeons.

The Instituto Espacio para la Memoria (Space for 
Memory Institute) tried to heal the wound between 
the footballers who won the Cup and the victims 
of the military regime by hosting the "Other 
Final" in 2008. Among those players present were 
Luque, Villa and Houseman who, like a large part 
of Argentine society, were unaware of the 
magnitude of the massacres. Some of the players 
did not join that act, and indeed criticised it, 
while the then coach, Menotti, stayed away. 
Medals were handed over to the participants 
saying: ?In recognition of your participation in 
the ?Other Final?. The match for life and human 
rights.? Houseman shed tears, Luque was 
noticeably emotional and Villa, pioneer in 
recognising that horror, was at all the 
microphones. Joaqu?n, Manuel and Sebasti?n, 
children of Ernesto and Juan, had their Argentine 
shirts signed by the players. Before travelling 
to Cape Town, this Argentinean team had 
themselves photographed holding a huge banner 
saying, 'We support the Mothers of the Plaza (a 
group of women who stood up to the dictatorship) 
for the Nobel Peace Prize'. Would that have been 
possible without Maradona's consent?

Maradona turned to the Left during his worst 
personal crisis while battling a drug addiction. 
He travelled to a detoxification clinic in Cuba 
and Fidel Castro mentored him at that time. 
Today, Maradona sports a Che tattoo on his arm 
and one of Fidel in his calve. The "golden kid" 
was an iconic presence at the 2005 demonstrations 
at Mar del Plata, where he sported a George Bush 
war criminal tee shirt and called him human 
garbage. One of those present at that 
demonstration was a Boca Junior fan who had 
always dreamt of meeting Maradona -- Evo Morales, 
now the Bolivian President. Maradona might not be 
all that stands between the Argentinean Right and 
a presidential victory but "el diez" (the perfect 
one in reference to his No 10 shirt), warts and 
all, is part of the Argentine, Latin American and 
international Left. Even English socialists must feel like jumping at this.

More Latin America reports at 
<http://nuestrosricos.blogspot.com/>Meeting Point 
(http://nuestrosricos.blogspot.com/)




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  9 17:32:43 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:32:43 -0700
Subject: [News] California dockworkers reject meeting with Israeli consul
Message-ID: <mailman.127.1278711171.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

California dockworkers reject meeting with Israeli consul

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11384.shtml
Report, The Electronic Intifada, 9 July 2010

[]

Picketers at the Port of Oakland prevent the unloading of goods from 
an Israeli ship on 20 June 2010. (Bill Hackwell)

Two weeks after the International Longshore and Warehouse Union 
(ILWU) in the San Francisco Bay Area joined with activists at the 
Port of Oakland 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11348.shtml>to block the 
unloading of an Israeli Zim Lines cargo ship, the union reaffirmed 
its support of Palestinian rights despite pressure from the Israeli 
consulate and the Zionist-Israeli organization Stand With Us.

On 6 July, a group representing the Israeli consulate and Stand With 
Us attempted to pressure the ILWU Local 10 into withdrawing its 
protest of Israel's 31 May attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and 
its condemnation of the Gaza siege and wall in the West Bank. The 
groups had asked to address the ILWU Local 10's Executive Board at 
their regular meeting.

However, the local union members were not easily persuaded, and 
denied permission for the Israeli delegation to attend their meeting, 
according to a press release issued by Labor for Palestine (US) 
("<http://www.laborforpalestine.net/wp/2010/07/08/oakland-dockers-stand-firm-as-israeli-consul-seeks-an-audience/>Oakland 
dockers stand firm as Israeli Consul seeks an audience," 7 July 2010).

The local's rejection of the meeting follows a request sent by the 
Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) to the ILWU 
Local 10 Executive board, praising the union's historic action at the 
Port of Oakland on 20 June. The Palestinian trade union leaders also 
expressed deep concern that the Israeli consulate would command a 
meeting with the union in an attempt to coerce members out of their 
political stance on Palestinian human rights.

"Although we do not live in the United States, we find it highly 
unusual and somewhat uncustomary that a paid foreign representative 
of a racist and apartheid regime can demand and get a meeting with 
the executive board of a local union no less than the ILWU," stated the PGFTU.

"We humbly ask of you to hold steadfast in the face of backlash and 
revenge against your union. The call for a meeting with your union by 
a foreign paid emissary is intervening in the domestic affairs of 
local community grassroots action in the United States. Israel, an 
apartheid state, maintaining an illegal war against our people, 
should not be given the platform at your union house. That platform 
should be reserved for heroes who champion justice and equality for 
all. Please ask Mr. Tor to end his government's criminal actions and 
answer for the 40,000 people Israel killed during the multiple 
invasions and occupations of Lebanon, the massacres of Deir Yassin, 
Qibya, Sabra and Shatila, Jenin and Gaza. Like the Turkish nationals 
[killed on 31 May], the fallen have names, lives and families and 
worked in the most destitute of conditions. Our mission, like yours, 
is to bring dignity to our working people."



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul  9 17:53:03 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:53:03 -0700
Subject: [News] Oil Spill Devastates Amazon Region in Peru
Message-ID: <mailman.130.1278712385.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Oil Spill Devastates Amazon Region in Peru

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/2582-oil-spill-devastates-amazon-region-in-peru
Written by David Hill
Wednesday, 07 July 2010 12:24


On June 19 hundreds of barrels of oil were 
spilled in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon, 
leading to calls for a ?state of emergency? to be 
declared and an appeal to the United Nations to intervene.

The oil was spilled by Argentine company 
Pluspetrol on the River Maranon in Loreto, 
northern Peru. This is far from the first time. 
According to a June 25 article in the Peruvian 
weekly 
<http://www.hildebrandtensustrece.com/index.html>Hildebrandt 
en sus trece, the same company has spilled oil 78 
times in the last four years in this region: four 
spills in 2006, 23 in 2007, 18 in 2008, 23 in 2009, and 10 this year already.

?We went down to the river to do our washing and 
realised there were traces of oil in the water. 
That was a shock. We went a little further along 
the bank and soon realised that there were 
patches of oil everywhere in the river,? said one 
local resident in an interview with radio station 
La Voz de la Selva, which has followed events closely.

Local reaction has centred on two main concerns. 
First, the fact that so many people rely on the 
river for their survival. According to leading 
indigenous organization 
<http://www.aidesep.org.pe/>Asociaci?n 
Inter?tnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana 
(AIDESEP), at least 28 indigenous communities - 
in other words, thousands of people - use the 
river for their drinking water, cooking and fishing.

Second, the fact that Pluspetrol?s and the 
Peruvian authorities? response to the spill was 
so patently inadequate. A statement from a 
coalition of local organizations accused 
Pluspetrol of failing to act quickly enough, and 
Peru?s Energy Ministry of playing down the 
gravity of the spill. ?It?s not like the Gulf of 
Mexico,? the Energy Minister was quoted as saying.

Tragically, this is nothing new in northern Peru 
where 
<http://www.earthrights.org/publication/legacy-harm>oil 
has devastated indigenous land and lives for 
decades. On the River Corrientes, Amazon Watch, 
Earthrights International and Peruvian NGO 
Racimos de Ungurahui estimate that nine billion 
barrels of toxic waste have been dumped into 
streams and wetlands since the 1970s.

"On the international news the Gulf spill is 
priority news. Presidents of governments and 
multinationals speak about the BP disaster, but 
nobody is talking about the damage suffered by 
our river and communities," said the 
<http://www.redambientalloretana.org/>Loreto 
Environmental Network (RAL), a local 
environmental watchdog based in Iquitos, the biggest town in the region.

Worse, speaking out against this damage makes you 
enemies. Peru?s Minister of the Interior decided 
to 
<http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/6176>expel 
Paul McAuley, president of the RAL. McAuley has 
been a fierce critic of environmenta and human 
rights abuses in northern Peru for years. In 
response 
<http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/missionary-defending-amazon-tribes-peru-must-not-be-deported-2010-07-07>Amnesty 
International has called on the Peruvian government to reverse its decision.

?The government?s attitude towards Indigenous 
people and those who work to protect their rights 
is deeply disturbing,? said Guadalupe Marengo, 
Deputy Americas Director at Amnesty 
International. ?This attempt to expel a human 
rights advocate who has worked tirelessly to 
protect Amazon communities and their environment 
is the latest example of the attack on Indigenous 
People?s rights that is taking place in Peru.?

McAuley, who has lived in Peru for 20 years and 
who faces deportation today, said "What we do at 
the Loreto Environmental Network is 
awareness-raising so that biodiversity is treated 
legally and responsibly. To some people that 
seems to be a threat, or contrary to public 
order. Our work is to educate people."
These are grim times in Peru. Since the 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/1895-50-days-of-protest-and-one-massacre-in-the-peruvian-amazon>tragic 
violence at Bagua last year, when armed 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/1896-massacre-in-peru-photo-essay-and-dispatch-on-the-bloody-conflict>Peruvian 
police attacked indigenous protesters, the 
government has been actively persecuting 
indigenous leaders and trying to undermine their 
organizations. Now it appears to be doing the same to their allies.

At the same time, the government continues on its 
course to open up as much of the Amazon as 
possible to oil and gas companies. In recent 
months, representatives from Perupetro, the state 
oil and gas agency, have been touring cities like 
London and Paris announcing a further 10.6 
million hectares of the Amazon are open for business this year.

AIDESEP have condemned Perupetro?s plans and said 
that indigenous people have not been consulted. 
Last month, in a move that provoked storms of 
criticism, president Alan Garcia 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/24/peru-president-blocks-conservation-law>blocked 
a law that would have recognized indigenous 
people's right to consultation about projects 
affecting their communities and land.

David Hill is a researcher with 
<http://www.survivalinternational.org/>Survival.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 12 15:40:34 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:40:34 -0700
Subject: [News] Lybian 'Hope' Ship On Its Way To Gaza
Message-ID: <mailman.155.1278963637.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



'Hope' Ship On Its Way To Gaza

author

  Monday July 12, 2010 01:50
author
 by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC & Agencies
http://www.imemc.org/article/59109

Palestinian independent Legislator, Jamal el-Khodary, head of the 
Popular Committee Against the Siege, and Arab member of Knesset, Dr. 
Ahmad Tibi, stated that the Hope solidarity ship sent by Libya 
continued its path to Gaza after arriving at Crete island.

The two legislators said that, so far, no delays were reported and 
that everything is going according to the original plan.

The ship was sent by Kaddafi Charitable Society, and is supported by 
Saif al-Islam, the son of Libyan leader Mommar Kaddafi.

Tibi and el-Khodary thanked Saif al-Islam for sending the ship that 
carries political and humanitarian messages.

El-Khodary stated that the ship carries medicine and humanitarian 
supplies, and that its organizers insist to reach Gaza to deliver 
them. They have detailed lists of everything and everybody aboard the ship.

The Palestinian Legislator thanked the Libyan President, different 
organizations that supported the ship and the Libyan people for 
standing against the illegal Israeli siege on Gaza.

He added that any Israeli attack against the ship is another act of 
piracy punishable by international law, and called on the 
international community to protect all solidarity ships.

Meanwhile, Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said that 
Israel will not allow the ship to reach Gaza.

Speaking to the Israeli Radio, Lieberman said that "no ship will 
reach Gaza", and considered solidarity ships as "acts that harm 
Israel's sovereignty".

He added that the ship must go to al-Arish Egyptian Port, or follow 
the orders of the Israeli army and dock in Ashdod Port.

The ship carries 2000 tons of foodstuffs, medicine, and other 
humanitarian supplies, while its organizers said that it does not 
violate international laws and regulations.




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522 Valencia Street
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 12 16:09:20 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:09:20 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Ecuador=92s_Economy_Under_Rafael_Correa=3A_?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?_Twenty-First_Century_Socialism_or_the_New-Extractivism=3F?=
Message-ID: <mailman.158.1278965382.31120.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Ecuador?s Economy Under Rafael Correa: 
Twenty-First Century Socialism or the 
New-Extractivism? ? An Inteview with Alberto Acosta

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2586-ecuadors-economy-under-rafael-correa-twenty-first-century-socialism-or-the-new-extractivism--an-inteview-with-alberto-acosta
Written by Jeffery R. Webber
Monday, 12 July 2010 09:54


I spoke with Alberto Acosta, ex-Minister of 
Energy and Mines, and ex-President of the 
Constituent Assembly, in his Quito office on July 8, 2010.

Jeffery R. Webber: In a few words, can you 
describe your political formation and political trajectory?

Alberto Acosta: I?m an economist. I?ve worked as 
an international consultant and as a university 
professor. I?ve been an advisor to social 
movements, to the indigenous movement. I?ve been 
involved in various struggles in the last few 
years which are trying to build a country based 
in equality, liberty, and justice. In the early 
part of the Rafael Correa government, I was the 
Minister of Energy and Mines and the President of the Constituent Assembly.

JW: As a former Minister of Energy and Mines, can 
you talk about the strengths and weaknesses of 
the economic model being advanced by the Correa 
government in the current conjuncture?

AA: We can?t talk about the economic development 
model of only this government. Stretching way 
back, Ecuador has had a model of accumulation 
based on the extraction of natural resources. 
Ecuador has been a country based in the 
production of bananas, flowers, shrimp, and oil, 
and there are people who now believe that it can 
be a country based in mining production.

In reality, we?ve been living off the rent of 
nature. In the last few decades, since the 1970s, 
Ecuador has had as its principal source of 
revenue the exploitation of oil ? the extraction 
of crude oil and the export of oil into the 
international market. This is a fundamental 
characteristic of the Ecuadorean economy. And 
this has not changed substantively under the government of Correa.

It?s true that he?s sought greater participation 
of the state in generating the oil rent. There?s 
been a certain increase of state control over oil 
activities. There?s been an attempt to increase 
the efficiency and to strengthen the state oil 
company. And the state?s greater take of the oil 
rent has allowed for improvements in education, health, and social welfare.

But at the root of things, the fact that Ecuador 
has an economy dependent on natural resources has 
not been altered, and we remain highly dependent 
on our insertion into the world market.

JW: You were also President of the Constituent 
Assembly. Can you talk about this process, and 
the advances and setbacks related to the new Constitution.

AA: The new constitution opened the door for a 
series of profound changes. Its statutes 
guarantee the construction of a plurinational 
state. This means the incorporation for the first 
time of marginalized groups, like indigenous 
peoples and nationalities, and Afro-Ecuadoreans. 
The constitution mandates respect for their 
unique ways of life and community organizing, and 
a new way of structuring the state in general.

The Constitution also commits the country to 
?living well,? or sumak kawsay, in Quichua, which 
is an entirely distinct way of understanding 
development. It?s another form of development. 
It?s an alternative to development, an 
alternative not within development, but an 
entirely different concept to development. Along 
these lines, the Constitution guarantees the 
rights of nature. Nature is a subject with rights 
in the Constitution. Ecuador?s Constitution is 
the only one in the world with this characteristic.

The Constitution also notes that water is a 
fundamental human right, not just access to 
water, but water itself. Water is a strategic 
patrimony. Water is part of biodiversity. It is central to nature.

JW: How do you explain the contrast between, on 
the one hand, the rhetoric of the Correa 
government ? ?citizens? revolution,? 
?twenty-first century socialism? ? and, on the 
other, the tense relations, often open clashes, 
between this government and prominent social movements?

AA: These phrases, citizens? revolution and 
twenty-first century socialism, have to be 
understood in their full context. Socialism of 
the twenty-first century has absolutely no 
meaning. It has no meaning. We need to rescue 
socialism from the errors of the last century, 
but we can?t do this by promoting some kind of 
?new age? socialism. For me, twenty-first century 
socialism has no meaning, it is pure rhetoric.

The phrase citizens? revolution is what popular 
struggles in Ecuador proposed and struggled for 
beginning in 2006 and 2007. Lamentably, it would 
appear that the Correa government has its doubts 
about making a revolution in reality. The very 
things this government proposed initially it is 
failing to make a reality; it is failing to 
respect the integral components of the new 
Constitution. This is the crucial thing to take note of.

At the moment, the ?citizens? revolution? suffers 
from a major deficit of citizens? involvement.

JW: And the contradictions with the social 
movements, the indigenous movements, government 
accusations of ?terrorism and sabotage??

AA: I believe that these types of accusations are 
tremendously shameful for the country. They have 
no basis in justice or a democratic judicial 
system. Even during the period of the neoliberal 
governments, when social movements and the 
indigenous movement were massively involved in 
protests ? there were never accusations of 
terrorism. This is a question that is putting the 
citizens? revolution itself at risk. It would 
appear that there are forces that are configuring 
themselves in a type of counter-revolution, without citizenship.

JW: For Canadian readers, can you describe some 
of the conflicts in the mining sector, and the 
role of Canadian companies, because they have a 
massive presence in this country.

AA: Without a doubt. Look, Canadian companies 
have been very active in this country for some 
years. One could say that Canadian companies were 
the primary beneficiaries of the new disposition 
of the mining laws throughout the early 2000s. 
These laws were meant to strengthen the presence 
of mining companies in Ecuador. This was a 
project pushed forward by the World Bank, and 
which received support from the governments of 
that epoch. We?re talking about the neoliberal epoch.

Canadian companies were the ones who took 
advantage of the new laws with the greatest 
enthusiasm, to invest in Ecuador. Canadian 
companies have expanded their presence in various 
regions of the country. In the Cordillera de 
Condor, in the Intag Valley, and elsewhere. 
They?ve managed to win a huge number of mining 
concessions. Ecuador gave out over 5,000 
concessions in an irresponsible manner, without 
any controls or criteria. The great majority of 
these concessions were concentrated in the hands 
of just a few companies, Canadian companies.

We can also see how some Canadian companies, such 
as Ascendant Copper, have tried to impose their 
objectives in an authoritarian manner in the 
country. They have established schemes of 
paramilitarism, in order to divide the 
communities of Intag, to intimidate these 
communities, and to impose mining activities.

I was personally a witness to how this company 
mobilized people to protest against my presence 
as Minister of Energy and Mines at the time 
because my politics ran against this type of 
corruption. I remember receiving threats and 
having rocks thrown at me during a meeting in the 
city of Ibarra, in the province of Imbabura. We 
saw how they acted, and how they threatened the 
communities. Thanks to the struggles of these 
very communities, and the actions of the Ministry 
of Energy and Mines at the time, we managed to 
disarm these paramilitaries, and achieved some 
justice. But there are still many problems in the 
region. I believe it?s important to highlight 
these events and what they signify.

JW: Shifting themes, we?ve seen a shift to the 
left in Latin America ? full of contradictions, 
but nonetheless a shift ? over the last decade. 
What has Ecuador?s role been inside this regional turn to the Left?

AA: There has been a series of very interesting 
processes in Latin America ? in Venezuela, 
Bolivia, and Ecuador. However, none of these new 
processes have managed to overcome the economic 
structures of extractivism. Bolivia continues to 
be dependent, even more dependent than before, on 
natural gas. Bolivia is making concerted efforts 
to extend oil, gas, and mineral extraction. In 
Ecuador the orientation is toward ongoing 
exploitation of oil. Although, one has to 
highlight the proposals of Ecuador to leave the 
oil under the ground in the National Park of 
Yasuni, which is positive. But, in general, it?s 
clear that there is no coherent position against 
the extractive model. There is a lot of talk of 
transformation and revolution, but it continues to be more of the same.

As I suggested, I don?t think there?s anything to 
what they?re calling socialism of the 
twenty-first century. What we?re witnessing 
instead is a neo-extractivism of the twenty-first century.

JW: In the long term, what does Ecuador need to 
change in its development model?

AA: What we need to do in the medium- to 
long-term is overcome this model of accumulation. 
We need another way to organize the economy, 
which is not so dependent on the exploitation of 
natural resources. We need to move from an 
extractive economic model, to one based in the 
knowledge, and forces, and needs of human beings, 
individual and collective. We also need another 
way of inserting ourselves into the world market 
that is more intelligent than simply providing 
raw materials. We need to start producing other 
kinds of products for the international market. 
But more than anything, fundamentally, we need to 
strengthen the internal market and to strengthen 
regional integration in Latin America. Ecuador 
needs to break with the extreme concentration of 
assets and income, and change the pattern. We 
need to achieve equality if there is to be 
justice and freedom. This is what we need. And 
this requires a lot of democracy. Always more democracy, and never less.

Jeffery R. Webber teaches politics at the 
University of Regina. He is the author of Red 
October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern 
Bolivia (Brill, 2010), and Rebellion to Reform in 
Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation 
and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket, 2011).




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 13 11:23:58 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:23:58 -0700
Subject: [News] Israel's 'street apartheid'
Message-ID: <mailman.4.1279034707.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Israel's 'street apartheid'
  By Mya Guarnieri

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/07/20107101335494763.html
Saturday, July 10, 2010

Mahmoud Alami, a Jerusalem taxi driver, knows the city like the back 
of his hand. He knows the neighbourhoods, the streets. And he knows 
the stop lights.

There is one in particular that troubles him not professionally but 
personally. It stands between Beit Hanina, a Palestinian 
neighbourhood, and Pisgaat Zeev, a Jewish settlement.

"It stays green for [settlers] for five minutes. But to go in and out 
of Beit Hanina? Only two or three cars can pass," Alami says. "It's 
too short. It causes a lot of traffic jams."

Al Jazeera found that stoplights that lead to Jewish settlements and 
neighbourhoods stay green for an average of a minute and a half. In 
Palestinian areas, it's 20 seconds. One light in predominantly Arab 
East Jerusalem is green for less than 10 seconds.

"[Palestinians] are stuck," says Amir Daud, another taxi driver. "It 
reflects a very bad situation for the people."

Budgetary discrimination
[]

Roads are poorly maintained in many Palestinian areas [GETTY]

Traffic jams are just one of the many problems that plague 
infrastructure and services in Palestinian areas of Jerusalem. Roads 
are poorly maintained. They are narrow and bumpy, riddled with cracks 
and potholes. Street signs and sidewalks are almost non-existent.

Trash containers are usually communal and there are often too few to 
meet the needs of the neighbourhood. Pedestrians, forced to walk on 
the shoulder of the road, wade through garbage.

Jewish neighbourhoods and settlements, on the other hand, are neat 
and orderly. Sidewalks and traffic circles keep pedestrians safe; 
roads are well-marked, some with lit signs. Most buildings have a 
garbage bin and the streets are free of litter.

In one Jewish area, a grassy median is adorned with a rainbow 
assortment of decorative sculptures - metal children playing, kicking 
footballs, and riding bikes.

When Al Jazeera presented a list detailing the differences between 
Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods to the Jerusalem municipality, the 
spokesperson denied the findings.

But, speaking on the condition of anonymity, a former employee of the 
Jerusalem municipality confirmed that there is discrimination on a 
budgetary level. The sports department offers the most dramatic 
example - only 0.5 per cent of funds are allocated to Palestinian 
neighbourhoods. The other 99.5 per cent goes to Jewish areas.

Quality of life

Nisreen Alyan, an attorney at the Association for Civil Rights in 
Israel (ACRI), has recently filed a petition protesting against the 
lack of garbage collection in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Tsur 
Baher, located in East Jerusalem. Despite a population of 20,000, 
only 12 streets receive the service.

This impacts both health and the quality of life, Alyan explains. 
Stray dogs, some carrying rabies, are attracted to the piles of 
trash. Residents have been attacked by the animals. And now children 
are afraid to go outside.

"There are no public gardens for them, they don't have anything," 
Alyan says. "So these streets are the only place for the cars, for 
the children, for the garbage, for the dogs, for everything."

The petition ACRI has filed asks the municipality to meet its legal 
responsibility, "nothing less, nothing more," Alyan says. "[This] 
means that they have to give [the residents] the right of sanitation."

Alyan has informed the city of Tsur Baher's troubles in the past. But 
the city claims it cannot serve the whole neighbourhood because 
garbage trucks cannot maneuver the small streets. Alyan points out 
that this should not be an obstacle. The municipality has found 
creative solutions in other parts of Jerusalem.

The streets in Tsur Baher are problematic, one resident explains. 
There are not enough of them.

While most Palestinian neighbourhoods are subject to building 
restrictions, Tsur Baher is one of the few that is free to build. 
Much of their land has been appropriated by a neighbouring 
settlement, Har Homa; some is on the other side of the Israeli-built 
separation barrier; and there is no infrastructure to reach what is left.

The lack of roads also means that emergency services cannot access 
all parts of the neighbourhood. Children have died in house fires. 
And because of a police order that prohibits ambulances from entering 
Palestinian neighbourhoods without a police escort residents have 
died waiting for medical care.

"The problem is that the policemen don't come in time," a resident 
says. "The ambulance is stopped waiting at the top of the 
neighbourhood for half an hour .... People have died in this situation."

"[ACRI is] writing another petition about it now," Alyan adds.

Paying taxes
[]

Lack of infrastructure leaves Palestinians feeling disconnected [EPA]

Asked about traffic lights in Tsur Baher, Alyan answers that there are none.

Out of concern for the children's safety, the residents scraped 
together the money to add speed bumps to the roads.

In other neighbourhoods, Palestinians have pooled funds to pay for 
garbage collection and street sweeping.

This is after they have paid taxes.

Because over 90 per cent of Israel's Palestinians live in towns 
separate from the Jewish population, many Israeli Jews excuse away 
the differences between Arab and Jewish areas with a "poor 
municipality" argument.

They are poor, their towns are poor. Arabs do not pay a lot of taxes, 
or enough taxes, or any taxes at all, Israeli Jews say, so their 
villages cannot afford the same services they enjoy.

But that reasoning falls apart in Jerusalem, a city striped with 
Palestinian and Jewish areas. And with Nof Tzion (Zion View), a 
Jewish settlement found smack in the centre of Jabel Mukhaber, a 
Palestinian neighbourhood, the differences are glaringly obvious.

"For years, [Jabel Mukhaber] didn't have a main street," Alyan says. 
"Just after they built Nof Tzion, [the municipality] built a very 
fine street with pavement and lights." But the road stops dead after 
Nof Tzion. It gets bumpy, dropping off into gravel, then dirt, for 
the Palestinians.

The "poor municipality" argument does not hold weight in Jerusalem 
for another reason. To the city's Palestinians, who have only 
residency and no citizenship, paying taxes is tremendously important.

"If you won't pay your taxes, you won't have proof that east 
Jerusalem is the centre of your life and if you can't prove that, you 
will lose your residency," Alyan explains. This means that one 
becomes stateless, a refugee.

"Before [Palestinian residents of Jerusalem] find money to feed their 
children, they pay their taxes," Alyan says.

Tsur Baher, along with neighbouring Umm Tuba, pays approximately $7mn 
in taxes annually to a municipality they do not get to vote for. East 
Jerusalem residents tell Alyan that they just want the government to 
invest what they have paid back into the neighbourhoods.

'Psychological warfare'

Yousef Jabareen, the director of Dirasat, the Arab Centre for Law and 
Policy, explains that public services are also funded on the national 
level. This is another point of inequality.

Jabareen points to the "National Priority" programme that gave 
economic incentives to government-selected areas. When the programme 
was introduced in 1998, 500 Jewish towns received national priority 
status. While Palestinians make up nearly 20 per cent of Israel's 
population, and half of the nation's poor, only four Arab villages 
were selected.

"That was a classic example of how the allocation of government 
resources is discriminatory," Jabareen says, adding that grave 
inequalities can be found in the state-funded educational system as well.

Everything - from the poor conditions of the infrastructure to the 
lack of public services - adds up to leave Palestinians feeling 
rejected and disconnected, Jabareen says.

"It's a feeling of frustration and of not belonging .... That the 
government and state is excluding you and you are not counted as an equal."

Do the disparities in Jerusalem's neighbourhoods and the differences 
in funding throughout the nation amount to apartheid?

"In some areas you could identify some characteristics of apartheid 
that should raise a lot of concern about the future," Jabareen comments.

A young Israeli Jew, fresh from army service, simply remarks, "It's a 
kind of psychological warfare. The idea is to get [Palestinians] to leave."




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 13 11:13:35 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:13:35 -0700
Subject: [News] Israel's video game killing technology
Message-ID: <mailman.7.1279034712.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Israel's video game killing technology

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 13 July 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11390.shtml


It is called Spot and Shoot. Operators sit in front of a TV monitor 
from which they can control the action with a PlayStation-style joystick.

The aim: to kill terrorists.

Played by: young women serving in the Israeli army.

Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look 
like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people -- 
Palestinians in Gaza -- who can be killed with the press of a button 
on the joystick.

The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are 
responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns 
mounted on watch-towers every few hundred meters along an electronic 
fence that surrounds Gaza.

The system is one of the latest "remote killing" devices developed by 
Israel's Rafael armaments company, the former weapons research 
division of the Israeli army and now a separate governmental firm.

According to Giora Katz, Rafael's vice-president, remote-controlled 
military hardware such as Spot and Shoot is the face of the future. 
He expects that within a decade at least a third of the machines used 
by the Israeli army to control land, air and sea will be unmanned.

The demand for such devices, the Israeli army admits, has been partly 
fueled by a combination of declining recruitment levels and a 
population less ready to risk death in combat.

Oren Berebbi, head of its technology branch, recently told an 
American newspaper: "We're trying to get to unmanned vehicles 
everywhere on the battlefield ... We can do more and more missions 
without putting a soldier at risk."

Rapid progress with the technology has raised alarm at the United 
Nations. Philip Alston, its special rapporteur on extrajudicial 
executions, warned last month of the danger that a "PlayStation 
mentality to killing" could quickly emerge.

According to analysts, however, Israel is unlikely to turn its back 
on hardware that it has been at the forefront of developing -- using 
the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and especially Gaza, as testing 
laboratories.

Remotely controlled weapons systems are in high demand from 
repressive regimes and the burgeoning homeland security industries 
around the globe.

"These systems are still in the early stages of development but there 
is a large and growing market for them," said Shlomo Brom, a retired 
general and defense analyst at the Institute of National Security 
Studies at Tel Aviv University.

The Spot and Shoot system -- officially known as Sentry Tech -- has 
mostly attracted attention in Israel because it is operated by 19- 
and 20-year-old female soldiers, making it the Israeli army's only 
weapons system operated exclusively by women.

Female soldiers are preferred to operate remote killing devices 
because of a shortage of male recruits to Israel's combat units. 
Young women can carry out missions without breaking the social taboo 
of risking their lives, said Brom.

The women are supposed to identify anyone suspicious approaching the 
fence around Gaza and, if authorized by an officer, execute them 
using their joysticks.

The Israeli army, which plans to introduce the technology along 
Israel's other confrontation lines, refuses to say how many 
Palestinians have been killed by the remotely controlled machine-guns 
in Gaza. According to the Israeli media, however, it is believed to 
be several dozen.

The system was phased-in two years ago for surveillance, but 
operators were only able to open fire with it more recently. The army 
admitted using Sentry Tech in December to kill at least two 
Palestinians several hundred meters inside the fence.

The Haaretz newspaper, which was given rare access to a Sentry Tech 
control room, quoted one soldier, Bar Keren, 20, saying: "It's very 
alluring to be the one to do this. But not everyone wants this job. 
It's no simple matter to take up a joystick like that of a Sony 
PlayStation and kill, but ultimately it's for defense."

Audio sensors on the towers mean that the women hear the shot as it 
kills the target. No woman, Haaretz reported, had failed the task of 
shooting what the army calls an "incriminated" Palestinian.

The Israeli military, which enforces a so-called "buffer zone" -- an 
unmarked no-man's land -- inside the fence that reaches as deep as 
300 metres into the tiny enclave, has been widely criticized for 
opening fire on civilians entering the closed zone.

In separate incidents in April, a 21-year-old Palestinian 
demonstrator was shot dead and a Maltese solidarity activist wounded 
when they took part in protests to plant a Palestinian flag in the 
buffer zone. The Maltese woman, Bianca Zammit, was videoing as she was hit.

It is unclear whether Spot and Shoot has been used against such demonstrations.

The Israeli army claims Sentry Tech is "revolutionary." And that will 
make its marketing potential all the greater as other armies seek out 
innovations in "remote killing" technology.

Rafael is reported to be developing a version of Sentry Tech that 
will fire long-range guided missiles.

Another piece of hardware recently developed for the Israeli army is 
the Guardium, an armored robot-car that can patrol territory at up to 
80km per hour, navigate through cities, launch "ambushes" and shoot 
at targets. It now patrols the Israeli borders with Gaza and Lebanon.

Its Israeli developers, G-Nius, have called it the world's first 
"robot soldier". It looks like a first-generation version of the 
imaginary "robot-armour" worn by soldiers in the popular recent 
sci-fi movie Avatar.

Rafael has produced the first unmanned naval patrol boat, the 
"Protector", which has been sold to Singapore's navy and is being 
heavily marketing in the US. A Rafael official, Patrick Bar-Avi, told 
the Israeli business daily Globes: "Navies worldwide are only now 
beginning to examine the possible uses of such vehicles, and the 
possibilities are endless."

But Israel is most known for its role in developing "unmanned aerial 
vehicles" -- or drones, as they have come to be known. Originally 
intended for spying, and first used by Israel over south Lebanon in 
the early 1980s, today they are increasingly being used for 
extrajudicial executions from thousands of feet in the sky.

In February Israel officially unveiled the 14 meter-long Heron TP 
drone, the largest ever. Capable of flying from Israel to Iran and 
carrying more than a ton of weapons, the Heron was tested by Israel 
in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in winter 2008-09, when some 1,400 
Palestinians were killed.

More than 40 countries now operate drones, many of them made in 
Israel, although so far only the Israeli and US armies have deployed 
them as remote-controlled killing machines. Israeli drones are being 
widely used in Afghanistan.

Smaller drones have been sold to the German, Australian, Spanish, 
French, Russian, Indian and Canadian armies. Brazil is expected to 
use the drone to provide security for the 2014 World Cup 
championship, and the Panamanian and Salvadoran governments want them 
too, ostensibly to run counter-drug operations.

Despite its diplomatic crisis with Ankara, Israel was reported last 
month to have completed a deal selling a fleet of 10 Herons to the 
Turkish army for $185 million.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. 
His latest books are 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/theelectronic-20>Israel 
and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the 
Middle East (Pluto Press) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/theelectronic-20>Disappearing 
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His 
website is <http://www.jkcook.net/>www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in 
<http://www.thenational.ae/>The National, published in Abu Dhabi.



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 14 10:04:30 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:04:30 -0700
Subject: [News] Iroquois Lacrosse Team Trapped in U.S.?
Message-ID: <mailman.40.1279116338.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Iroquois Lacrosse Team Trapped in U.S.?



Native American Team Could Miss Championships in U.K. Over New Travel 
Documentation Rules

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/13/national/main6672695.shtml

(AP)  The teams participating in the World Lacrosse Championships in 
England represent 30 nations, from Argentina to Latvia to South Korea 
to Iroquois.

The Iroquois helped invent lacrosse and, in a rare example of 
international recognition of American Indian sovereignty, they 
participate at every tournament as a separate nation. But they might 
not be at this year's world championship tournament because of a 
dispute over the validity of their passports.

The 23 players have passports issued by the Iroquois Confederacy, a 
group of six Indian nations overseeing land that stretches from 
upstate New York into Ontario, Canada.

The U.S. government says it will only let players back into the 
country if they have U.S. passports, a team official said. The 
British government, meanwhile, won't give the players visas if they 
cannot guarantee they'll be allowed to go home, the official said.

Iroquois team members born within U.S. borders have been offered U.S. 
passports, but the players refuse to carry them, because they see the 
government-issued documents as an attack on their identity, said 
Tonya Gonnella Frichner, a member of the Onondaga Nation who works 
with the team.

"It's about sovereignty, citizenship and self-identification," said 
Frichner, who also is the North American Regional Representative to 
the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

The Iroquois have used their own passports in the past, but State 
Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the new dispute can be traced 
to the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which went into effect 
last year. The new rules require, among other things, that Americans 
carry passports or high-tech documents to cross the country's borders.

"Since they last traveled on their own passports, the requirements in 
terms of the kind of documents that are necessary to facilitate 
travel within and outside the hemisphere have changed," Crowley said. 
"We are trying to help them get the appropriate travel documents so 
they can travel to this tournament."

Tribes' efforts to meet the new security requirements have been 
ongoing. A group of American Indian leaders requested funding from 
the Department of Homeland Security in 2009 to develop cards that 
would comply with the new rules, according to an agency document. 
Idaho's Kootenai tribe and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agreed 
last year to develop the first enhanced tribal card acceptable under 
the new guidelines.

Asked whether the Iroquois passport could be acceptably modified to 
meet the stricter standards, Crowley referred questions to the 
Department of Homeland Security.

That agency declined to discuss the specifics of the case. Matt 
Chandler, a Homeland Security spokesman, said his agency was working 
with the Department of State and others to resolve the issue.

One Iroquois player, Brett Bucktooth, said he would rather miss the 
tournament than travel under a U.S. passport.

"That's the people we are, and that's our identity," he said.

Bucktooth, 27, also spoke of his deep cultural and personal 
connection with lacrosse - first played by Iroquois and Huron, 
perhaps as early as 1,000 years ago.

"My father put a wooden lacrosse stick into my crib when I was a 
baby, and now that I have a son, I put a lacrosse stick into his 
crib," he said. "In our culture, we all start playing lacrosse young."

Bucktooth and other Iroquois see lacrosse as a gift to the tribes 
from their creator. Lacrosse was played by American Indians as a 
preparation for war and "to resolve conflicts, heal the sick, and 
develop strong, virile men," according to US Lacrosse, the American 
governing body of the sport.

Today, the Iroquois team is ranked No. 4 by the Federation of 
International Lacrosse and represents the Haudenosaunee - an Iroquois 
Confederacy of the Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Tuscarora, Cayuga and 
Onondaga nations. About 90,000 Haudenosaunee, or "the people of the 
longhouse," live today in New York, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and the 
Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, said Onondaga chief Oren Lyons.

The Iroquois team was scheduled to play at the 2010 World Lacrosse 
Championship that starts Thursday in Manchester, England.

The Iroquois team and its entourage of 25 - coaches, staff and family 
members - would have to leave New York by Tuesday evening at the 
latest to participate in the tournament, which is staged every four years.

The team has been traveling on Iroquois passports for the past 20 
years, and Iroquois passport-holders have been using them to go 
abroad since 1977, said Denise Waterman, a member of the team's board 
of directors. Within the last year, colleagues used their Iroquois 
passports to travel to Japan and Sweden without any problems, she said.

In the past, U.S. immigration officials accepted the Iroquois 
passports when they obtained visas - including for trips to Britain 
in 1985 and 1994, and as recently as 2002 to Australia. The 2006 
tournament was held in Canada.

Members of the Western Shoshonee and Hopi nations also have traveled 
internationally using similar passports, some within the last few 
months, said Valerie Taliman, a publicist for the Iroquois team.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson wrote a letter to Secretary of State 
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Homeland Security Secretary Janet 
Napolitano on Tuesday, urging them to help the team reach its destination.

"As a governor of a state with a significant Native American 
population, I know many tribes and pueblos will watch carefully how 
these young competitors are treated by the administration," he wrote.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., reached out to White House officials 
on Monday on behalf of the team, Frichner said.

Last week, the Iroquois team learned from a State Department official 
that the U.S. government would not allow it to return on its 
Haudenosaunee-issued passports, according to Frichner. The British 
Consulate in New York said it could only issue visas after receiving 
"a written confirmation from the Department of Homeland Security that 
you can leave the country and come back," she said.

Team officials went to the British Consulate in New York on Monday to 
reapply for the visas and plead their case, but were turned away. 
Later in the day, the English Lacrosse Association said in a 
statement it expected "the Iroquois will arrive on time for the 
opening ceremony and games."

After fighting off attempts at assimilation for more than a century, 
issues of sovereignty strike a deep chord for many Native Americans, 
said Dean Kotlowski, a history professor at Salisbury University in 
Maryland who specializes in American Indian policy.

"What's at stake is their culture, their identity, their tribes, 
their reservations," he said. "They've seen diminishment ... of their 
population, threats to their way of life."

The Iroquois team was in Manhattan on Monday as it awaited news of 
its status. It has been training on Staten Island in New York City, 
using the football field at Wagner College.

"We're anxious but optimistic," team manager Ansley Jemison said. "I 
don't think a lacrosse team full of world-class athletes poses much 
of a threat to homeland security."



Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 14 10:54:47 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:54:47 -0700
Subject: [News] Handcuffing 6-Year-Olds in New Orleans
Message-ID: <mailman.45.1279119838.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


[]

Published on The Root (<http://www.theroot.com>http://www.theroot.com)

<http://www.theroot.com/>Home > Handcuffing 6-Year-Olds in New 
Orleans? Seriously?

----------


Handcuffing 6-Year-Olds in New Orleans? Seriously?

By: Brentin Mock
Posted: July 9, 2010 at 7:59 AM

School officials shackled Ja'Briel Weston to a chair for being 
disobedient. Two days later, they did it again. Now his father is 
suing. Why we should all be concerned.

Six-year-old Ja'Briel Weston was shackled by his ankle to a chair for 
disobeying his first-grade teacher. Two days later, he was 
apprehended by an armed security guard, dragged down a hallway and 
handcuffed to a chair for getting into a shoving match with another 
student. This didn't happen at some medieval-age boarding school. It 
happened this year, this May, in New Orleans, at Sarah T. Reed 
Elementary School.

When Ja'Briel's parents found out about this, his father, Sebastian 
Weston, met with the school's principal, Daphyne Burnett, who not 
only confessed to the child cuffing but also said that she'd have it 
done again if the child got out of line. According to a legal 
complaint filed by the 
<http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-sues-new-orleans-school-after-student-handcuffed>Southern 
Poverty Law Center and the <http://jjpl.org/new/>Juvenile Justice 
Project of Louisiana, "When [Ja'Briel's] father implored the school 
principal to stop these unconstitutional practices, she insisted that 
school policy required the arrests and seizures at the school."

The juvenile-justice advocacy organizations are helping the father 
sue not only the school and its security officers but also the 
Recovery School District, the city's public school system, for 
allowing the "required" policy to take shape. Since the incident, 
young Ja'Briel has suffered pain in his wrists and ankles, as well as 
longer-lasting harm to his emotional and psychological well-being. 
This is increasingly cruel, but unfortunately not unusual punishment, 
since New Orleans isn't the only city to 
<http://www.stateline.org/live/printable/story?contentId=18518>cuff a 
6-year-old. But if there is a city that could do with less emotional 
pain, it is New Orleans, whose children in the thousands, displaced 
as a result of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, have bounced city to 
city, school to school, ever since.

It is also a city where one of the largest education-reform 
experiments anywhere is being implemented. But the officials at Sarah 
T. Reed will have to remind the nation why introducing children to 
Officer Friendly by way of cold, metal wrist restraints is a best 
practice for optimum learning environments. Data supporting such a 
claim do not exist. When young black boys like Ja'Briel aren't being 
chained like criminals for petty behavior, they are being suspended 
and expelled from school at rates two to three times those of their 
white peers -- often 
<http://www.learnersedgeinc.com/file/737-6.pdf>because of their race 
(pdf). Excessive punishment is being meted out more often to kids to 
whom breakfast is not given and for whom lunch is free because of 
their families' poverty.

School administrators believe that they need to get tough on bad 
behavior, but there is little evidence that this is a deterrent. In 
New Orleans, schools struggle with a lack of resources to deal 
adequately with student populations that fluctuate with volatility, 
and include children with a range of stress disorders due to 
disasters. Just two years ago, Reed principal Burnett was featured in 
a 
<http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june08/nolareads_06-17.html>PBS 
special in which she complained of overcrowding in her school.

"When you look at younger kids, out of anything they could have lost, 
it was the opportunity to have a stable learning environment," said 
Burnett in the program. "You know, some of them, this is their first 
time going to school because Katrina hit."

But instead of stable learning environments being created, it's 
pipelines that are being created -- pipelines to the penal 
institution. It begins with kids being handcuffed and suspended at 
early ages, and continues with them being locked up later in life. 
Students who are suspended early on (Ja'Briel was suspended shortly 
after the handcuff incident) are 
<http://www.nyclu.org/content/impact-of-school-suspensions-and-demand-passage-of-student-safety-act>three 
times more likely to drop out before 10th grade, and drop-out status 
triples a child's chances of ending up in jail later.

In the report 
"<http://www.nesri.org/fact_sheets_pubs/Pushed_Out_Report.pdf>Pushed 
Out, Harsh Discipline in Louisiana Schools Denies the Right to 
Education" (pdf), published by Families and Friends of Louisiana's 
Incarcerated Children, a disturbing picture is painted of disparate 
discipline practices in New Orleans schools: Suspensions in the 
Recovery School District are among the highest in the state, with 
some 186 out-of-school suspensions from just 33 schools handed out 
each week. The district's suspension rate, 28.8 percent, is four 
times the national rate. Of the students the organization surveyed, 
37 percent said that they fell behind in school after suspension, and 
25 percent said that they felt less motivated to learn.

Meanwhile, the report shows how out-of-school suspension and 
expulsion rates increased after Katrina, as did budgets for security 
officers -- $20 million in 2006-2007, as opposed to $3 million for 
2004-2005 -- despite significantly fewer students.

If there are any doubts about whether prison bars are in the forecast 
for some of these students, consider that just last week, the city 
council 
<http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/07/new_prison_complex_plan_approv.html>approved 
a sheriff's plan to expand a major prison complex in the city. The 
juvenile courts are also in question, after one of the system's 
judges 
<http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/07/report_says_former_juvenile_co.html>resigned 
this week after multiple female employees within his courthouse 
accused him of sexual harassment. Some of the city's leaders are even 
confused 
<http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/11/mayoral_campaign_will_be_educa.html>about 
what the Youth Study Center is -- a detention center where youth 
offenders are currently baking because of malfunctioning air conditioners.

Other cities are dealing with poor disciplinary practices, as 
reported in 
<http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2007/10/the-discipline.html>Florida, 
<http://journalismfor.us/JJIE/2010/07/school-discipline/>Georgia and 
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/eedition/chi-070924discipline,0,7975055.story>Illinois. 
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that a middle school that 
<http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-479.ZS.html>searched a 
13-year-old girl's backpack, bra and panties for alleged 
prescription-pill peddling (never found) violated her Fourth 
Amendment rights. What this all adds up to are zero-tolerance 
policies that have already slid too far down the slope of acceptable 
disciplinary practice.

One plausible reason that schools have been able to get away with so 
much is that students themselves are rarely included at the table 
when disciplinary sentencing rules are established. In New Orleans, a 
group called <http://www.therethinkers.com/what-weve-done/>Kids 
Rethink New Orleans Schools has set out to change that. In this 
group, children from the Recovery School District brainstorm conflict 
resolutions and make recommendations on how schools can preserve 
dignity for students even when delivering punishment. Among 
<http://www.therethinkers.com/wp-content/Recommendations-09.pdf>recommendations 
they made last year (pdf) are deterring mandatory use of metal 
detectors in elementary schools, and increasing social worker and 
counseling staffs in schools.

If Ja'Briel Weston's father, and the juvenile-justice advocates 
supporting him, win their case, schools will hopefully get an 
opportunity to produce alternatives to their current methods of 
dealing with problem children. And perhaps a win will compel the 
school district and state government to supply more resources so that 
schools can implement those alternatives. If they lose, this would 
send a bad signal to other schools throughout New Orleans and beyond, 
that shackling 6-year-olds is acceptable. Just as common sense tells 
us that waterboarding is torture, we should be able to discern that 
handcuffing is cruel and unusual for children in their earliest ages 
of development.

Brentin Mock, a regular contributor to The Root, is based in New Orleans.

----------
Source URL: 
<http://www.theroot.com/views/nola-child-handcuffs>http://www.theroot.com/views/nola-child-handcuffs

Links:
[1] http://www.theroot.com/users/brentinmock
[2] 
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-sues-new-orleans-school-after-student-handcuffed
[3] http://jjpl.org/new/
[4] http://www.stateline.org/live/printable/story?contentId=18518
[5] http://www.learnersedgeinc.com/file/737-6.pdf
[6] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june08/nolareads_06-17.html
[7] 
http://www.nyclu.org/content/impact-of-school-suspensions-and-demand-passage-of-student-safety-act
[8] http://www.nesri.org/fact_sheets_pubs/Pushed_Out_Report.pdf
[9] 
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/07/new_prison_complex_plan_approv.html
[10] 
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/07/report_says_former_juvenile_co.html
[11] 
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/11/mayoral_campaign_will_be_educa.html
[12] 
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2007/10/the-discipline.html
[13] http://journalismfor.us/JJIE/2010/07/school-discipline/
[14] 
http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/eedition/chi-070924discipline,0,7975055.story
[15] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-479.ZS.html
[16] http://www.therethinkers.com/what-weve-done/
[17] http://www.therethinkers.com/wp-content/Recommendations-09.pdf
[18] http://www.facebook.com/theroot
[19] http://www.twitter.com/theroot247
[20] http://www.theroot.com/sites/default/files/jabriel1.JPG




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522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 14 11:34:02 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:34:02 -0700
Subject: [News] Fadlallah and the Western media's dangerous complicity
Message-ID: <mailman.53.1279121664.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Fadlallah and the Western media's dangerous complicity

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11391.shtml
Matthew Cassel, The Electronic Intifada, 14 July 2010



There is a lot to say about Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein 
Fadlallah, the Lebanese Shia Muslim cleric who passed away on 4 July 
2010 at the age of 75. Unfortunately, much of what there is to say is 
being left unsaid for more of the same sensationalist reporting on 
this region and its people.

Fadlallah was a progressive Shia cleric, known for his defense of 
armed resistance and women's rights. He was outspoken against 
Israel's 22 year occupation of south Lebanon and cheered attacks 
against it. In 1985 the CIA is thought to have been behind a massive 
car bomb that attempted to take his life -- it missed the Ayatollah 
killing 80 other Lebanese civilians and injured hundreds more. 
However, his support for resistance didn't end with the Israeli 
invaders; Ayatollah Fadlallah also said that women have the right to 
use violence to resist domestic abuse.

The day after his death, Nasawiya, a feminist collective in Lebanon, 
wrote a post on Facebook telling Fadlallah: "Your feminist voice will 
be missed." The post linked to an obituary by journalist Zeinab Yaghi 
writing in Arabic for the Lebanese daily As-Safir where she wrote of 
Fadlallah: "Women used to see him as a father" and that he 
"encouraged women to work."

He was a leader for many Shia Muslims in Lebanon and elsewhere around 
the world. In Lebanon, a country divided along strict sectarian 
lines, he was a truly unique religious figure for the respect that he 
garnered from people of other faiths and the secular alike.

Most headlines in English-language media outlets have wrongly linked 
Fadlallah to Hizballah, the Shia Islamic resistance and political 
group in Lebanon. It is said that Fadlallah influenced some of 
Hizballah's founders along with numerous other young Shias in the 
years leading up to and during Hizballah's formation in the early 
1980s. But in Lebanon it is widely known that, despite their mutual 
respect for each other, Fadlallah and Hizballah did not work together 
and even disagreed on many issues. Some of these fundamental 
differences stem from Hizballah's close relationship with the Islamic 
Republic of Iran, whereas Fadlallah had long opposed the Ayatollah 
Khomeini-inspired clerical leadership of the country after its 1979 revolution.

This intentional mistake of linking Fadlallah to Hizballah should 
come as little surprise from a media that too often chooses 
sensationalism over accuracy when covering Lebanon and the region. As 
a journalist and photographer working in Lebanon, I know that 
European and US media are rarely interested in political or religious 
topics when the focus is not Hizballah. Ayatollah Fadlallah's 
importance had little to do with Hizballah, and that was clear on 6 
July 2010 when hundreds of thousands took to the streets to mourn his death.

Breaking from this sensationalist coverage was a blog post on the 
British government's website by Frances Guy, the British ambassador 
in Lebanon (whose positions 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11146.shtml>I've criticized 
in the past), which contained the following:

"The world needs more men like [Fadlallah] willing to reach out 
across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and 
daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace. "

It was a very kind tribute to a religious leader based on Guy's 
experience learning about Fadlallah and meeting him in Beirut. She 
even succeeded in not mentioning "Hizballah" once. I would happily 
link to the post had it not been removed "after mature consideration" 
by the UK Foreign Office who thought that Guy was being a bit too 
laudatory of a person who died under the "Hizballah leader" 
headlines. (Fortunately, what goes on the web stays on the web and 
you can find her post cached 
<http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TFmI-tgOGuoJ:blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/guy/entry/the_passing_of_decent_men+frances+guy+decent+men&hl=ar&gl=lb&strip=0>here.) 
Guy later wrote a new post expressing regret for ever writing the tribute:

"I have no truck with terrorism wherever it is committed in whoever's 
name. The British Government has been clear that it condemns 
terrorist activity carried out by Hizballah. I share that view."

Similar to Guy, Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor of Mideast affairs, 
also offered her admiration for Fadlallah after his death over the 
social networking site Twitter:

"Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. 
One of Hizballah's giants I respect a lot."

Nasr, a Lebanese-American journalist who has worked with CNN for 20 
years, later wrote an article regretting her tweet which was then 
removed; in her article she was sure to remind us which side she is 
on, using the words "terror" or terrorist" five times. I've followed 
her work with CNN and know that her reporting would hardly upset 
anyone in any recent US administration. Yet the one time she does, 
she loses her job as a result.

These blatant acts of censorship by western governments and media 
prove that showing an accurate or nuanced picture of the Middle East 
is not high on their agendas. After all, an accurate picture would 
show that western-waged and backed wars in this region are far from 
just, and therefore it's easy to understand how resistance to them is 
widely supported. Not only did Fadlallah support resistance, but he 
also challenged the stereotype many have in the west of Islam as a 
religion intolerant of women's rights.

Fadlallah was a leader that anyone even slightly familiar with this 
region could easily respect. The censored coverage of his passing in 
the west proves the complicity of our media with our government's 
deadly and oppressive policies in the Middle East.

Matthew Cassel is based in Beirut, Lebanon and is Assistant Editor of 
The Electronic Intifada. His website is 
<http://justimage.org>http://justimage.org.



Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 14 18:07:29 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:07:29 -0700
Subject: [News] Haiti - Six Months After the Quake
Message-ID: <mailman.61.1279145272.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Haiti: Six Months after the Quake

by Johnny Van Hove / July 13th, 2010
<http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/07/haiti-six-months-after-the-quake-2/>DISSIDENT 
VOICE
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/07/haiti-six-months-after-the-quake-2/

Half a year following the earthquake, conditions 
in Haiti are worse than ever. Still, there is ?a 
lot to be hopeful for?, according to Robert Roth 
of the activist network Haiti Action Committee 
who recently visited the Caribbean island. An interview.

Johnny Van Hove: How are the living conditions in 
Haiti six months after the quake?

Robert Roth: During my visit a few weeks ago, I 
was struck by the absence of systematic aid for 
Haitians. The food distribution has been 
haphazard at best. Work is scarce and there are 
no massive efforts to prepare for the approaching 
hurricanes. Above all, shelter for the 1.5 
million Haitians living in the camps is hardly 
existent and highly insufficient for the rainy 
season. Haiti truly is experiencing a 
humanitarian disaster of the highest order.

JVH: In what kind of shape are the refugee camps?

RR: Most people are living under plastic, sheets, 
or tarps ? not tents. There is hardly any space 
between the shelters. Sanitation is mostly 
non-existent. If you take a look inside the 
plastic tarps, people are cramped next to each 
other in narrow spaces. Some sheets are all they 
possess and these get soaked as soon as the tarp 
is flooded by the frequent rains.?

JVH: Over-crowding, bad sanitation, the rainy 
season: how do these elements affect the health situation in the camps?

RR: We spoke with a number of Haitian doctors and 
medical workers who are running clinics at the 
Aristide Foundation. There is a real fear of 
epidemics. The day-to-day health issues are 
worrying too. Children are asthmatic because of 
the dust everywhere. Eye diseases, irritations, 
rashes, and constant headaches are major problems 
too. The same goes for dysentery, as there is 
very little potable water. The general health situation is horrific.

JVH: Considering these conditions, how are the 
Haitians you have talked to responding?

RR: We visited three camps and met with many 
grassroots activists on our trip. There is a high 
level of frustration with both the Haitian 
government and the international relief effort. 
Much has been promised, and hardly anything has been delivered.

In one camp, near the airport, residents had not 
seen any aid of any kind since late February. 
When we asked them about the Pr?val government, 
they said it was a ?zero? and did not represent 
them. When we asked about the UN, they said they 
just drive by with their guns out. They want 
food, work and shelter for their families ? and they have not gotten that.

Weekly demonstrations against the Pr?val 
government and the UN occupation have been 
growing. One week before I was there, 30,000 
people had demonstrated in Port-au-Prince, 
calling for Pr?val?s ouster, democratic and fair 
elections, the end of the UN occupation, and the 
return of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide 
to Haiti. It?s a charged political situation right now.

JVH: In our last interview, you mentioned the 
high degree of grassroots organizing in Haiti. 
Have you seen that happening in the camps too?

RR: Yes. This is one aspect of the situation in 
Haiti that goes unreported. In one refugee camp, 
Camp Mesiane, women organizers mobilized people 
to demonstrate in front of a Red Cross center, 
since they had received no aid. They then 
continued to meet with camp residents to deal 
with security, health needs and food. This is 
happening in many camps. It is Haitians helping 
Haitians, treating each other with dignity in the midst of crisis.

JVH: Are there Haitian organizations which are 
particularly stepping up in the camps?

RR: The Aristide Foundation has been providing 
medical services and relief from the days right 
after the quake. From February on, it ran mobile 
schools in five refugee camps, reaching over 
1,200 students. The Foundation created a weekly 
health clinic that serves 1,000 patients each 
week. It also has a mental health project in 
which Haitian health workers are going into the 
camps to reach out to people who have experienced 
the most severe psychological trauma. All of this 
work ? doing the maximum with the minimum amount 
of resources ? has had a deep impact.

JVH: Are the camps as unsafe as a number of media 
and relief organizations suggest?

RR: Of course there are major security issues 
when 1.5 million people are living in refugee 
camps, when the infrastructure is shattered, when 
communities have been uprooted, and when massive 
poverty and hunger is the norm. But Haiti is not 
a crime scene. The vast majority of people in Haiti are just trying to survive.

The issue of ?security? is highly politicized in 
Haiti. It has been used to justify attacks on 
popular organizations and communities, including 
violent assaults against community-based groups 
in Cite Soleil and other pro-Lavalas areas. When 
?insecurity? is projected as the main issue, 
rather than the undemocratic nature of the 
current government or the desperate situation 
faced by millions of people, that reflects a political agenda.

JVH: What about sexual violence, which is rampant 
in the camps according to various human rights organizations?

RR: The conditions in the camps heighten the 
dangers of sexual violence. It?s a real issue, 
one that community-based organizations ? 
particularly women?s groups ? are conscious of 
and working to address. At the same time, I 
believe that some human rights groups have presented this issue narrowly.

There is little discussion of the role of UN 
troops and the Haitian police force in regards to 
sexual violence. In 2007, 114 UN soldiers from 
Sri Lanka were sent home after widespread charges 
of rape and child abuse. Many people talked to us 
on this trip about how UN soldiers and Haitian 
police use access to food and aid in exchange for 
sex. This amounts to forced prostitution, 
completely linked to militarism and occupation. 
Why isn?t this being highlighted as well?

JVH: How did the Haitians you talked to evaluate the UN relief efforts so far?

RR: After distributing tarps and food in the 
first few weeks after the earthquake, the impact 
of the UN organizations is considered dismal 
since late February. The UN stopped its Emergency Food

Program in April, for instance, because it 
decided it was time to provide ?cash for work?. 
The main presence of the UN is not as relief 
workers; it?s as soldiers on patrol, pointing 
guns at people. They are considered a foreign 
occupying army. Many Haitians feel that the UN is 
targeting instead of helping them. In the absence 
of an effective relief effort, the UN presence is 
a daily reminder that Haiti is being run by foreign powers.

JVH: The Haitian political class handed over a 
great deal of its powers to the Haiti Recovery 
Commission, which has a mandate to coordinate 
distribution of all aid for at least 18 months. Who runs the commission?

RR: In the commission, big international players, 
such as the IMF, the World Bank, the U.S., Canada 
and France, are represented. It is chaired by 
Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Max 
Bellerive. Supposedly, President Pr?val has veto 
power over any decisions, but Clinton is clearly 
running it: Esquire Magazine has just called him ?the de facto CEO? of Haiti.

The Commission is in charge of doling out the 
$5.3 billion dollars which were pledged ? not 
given yet, pledged ? by UN members states and 
international institutions at the international 
donor conference in March. This kind of money 
will be used to reconfigure Haiti with a fairly 
classic model: low-wage factory work, a tourist 
industry, free trade zones with tax breaks for 
multinationals, open markets for U.S. goods, the usual.

JVH: Bill Clinton recently excused himself for 
the US trade policy during his presidency ? which 
forced Haitian farmers off land and undercut 
Haiti?s ability to feed itself. Was Clinton?s 
move a hopeful change of heart by one of the key players in Haiti?

RR: Bill Clinton loves to apologize. While he is 
apologizing, he is committing new actions for 
which he will have to excuse himself in the years 
to come. The pressure to privatize, for instance, 
continues up to this day in Haiti. The democratic 
movements are still under attack. The most 
popular political party in Haiti, Lavalas, is 
still banned from elections. The tiny Haitian 
elite is still Clinton?s major economic partner 
in Haiti. Former President Aristide is still in 
forced exile. The apologies will have to continue.

JVH: The Haitian democratic icon Aristide still 
lives in forced exile. Did you feel popular 
demand for his return during your stay in Haiti?

RR: It is highly ironic that George W. Bush and 
Bill Clinton can travel freely to Haiti while the 
twice-democratically elected president, 
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is banished. His return 
is a big issue in Haiti and a fundamental demand 
of the democratic movement. For instance, over 
20,000 women have already signed a petition demanding his immediate return.

How can free and fair elections be held when such 
a major spokesperson is prevented from even 
living in his homeland? How can the voices of the 
majority be heard when their political party is 
banned and their political representatives are 
silenced? In a period of such trauma and 
difficulty, Aristide?s return would provide hope 
and sustenance. We heard this everywhere, repeatedly.

JVH: Dramatic living conditions, a democracy 
smothered, and a two time elected former 
president banished: is the near future looking as 
bleak as this list indicates or has your trip suggested otherwise?

RR: There are two stories in Haiti which are 
happening simultaneously. One is the top-down 
reconstruction led by the US and the UN. This 
continues the elite model of development in Haiti 
of the past, repackaged since the earthquake. The 
other story involves the mobilizing efforts at 
the grassroots level. This is the hope for Haiti, 
the real democratic vision that is emerging from 
the disaster in Haiti. Numerous organizations 
responded to the quake by very visibly providing 
relief and support while continuing to fight for 
democracy. That changed the political dynamics in 
Haiti. On the grassroots level, there is a lot to be hopeful for.

Johnny Van Hove is a Belgian freelance 
journalist, a media activist, and a PhD student 
in the field of American Studies at the 
University of Bremen. He publishes for a wide 
range of critical media, such as the Belgian 
webpaper Dewereldmorgen.be. He is also the 
co-author the Belgian Indymedia reader Media and 
Racism. Read other articles by Johnny.




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522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 10:58:21 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:58:21 -0700
Subject: [News] British Governement Refuses Iroquois Admittance;
 Will Miss  Tournament
Message-ID: <mailman.70.1279205970.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Breaking News: British Governement Refuses Iroquois Admittance; Will 
Miss Tournament

Terry Foy July 14th, 2010
http://ht.ly/2bCGT

After four days of scrambling and hope, the Iroquois Nationals will 
not be traveling to Manchester to participate in the 2010 FIL World 
Championships, 
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iI149z8c0uBRphmB54w06NhPQlNwD9GV305G0>the 
Associated Press reported Wednesday night.


The report cited a British Consulate spokeswoman who said that the 
United Kingdom would only allow travel on passports they consider 
valid, and the Haudenosaunee-issued documents don't meet that standard.

The news comes only hours after the U.S. State Department 
<http://insidelacrosse.com/news/2010/07/14/breaking-iroquois-has-us-clearance-awaiting-visas-canadian-clearance>granted 
a one-time exception to the team's party, guaranteeing them 
admittance back into the country upon their return. The decision came 
too late Wednesday for the party to procure the proper clearance from 
Canadian and British officials 
<http://insidelacrosse.com/news/2010/07/14/iroquois-nationals-miss-4-pm-wednesday-flight-jfk>in 
order to board their 4 p.m. flight, but the hope was they'd be able 
to arrive in time for a rescheduled start to their tournament on 
Friday. According to the 
<http://2010worldlacrosse.com/news/1/97>Federation of International 
Lacrosse (FIL), if the Iroquois do not arrive in time for Thursday's 
7:30 p.m., game against England, they would forfeit.

The FIL said Thursday that England's game with Iroquois has been 
changed to a scrimmage against Germany. Sources within the Iroquois 
delegation say they're still fighting to get to England, and they may 
be trying to set up a scrimmage on Long Island Thursday night if they 
still can't get out of New York.

It's a disappointing next step in a highly publicized, nearly 
week-long process that's received not only 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/us/13lacrosse.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Iroquois&st=cse>national 
media attention, but a large outcry from the 
<http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/global/Iroquois-Nationals-tournament-departure-delayed-by-British-travel-snafu-98061744.html>Native 
American and 
<http://insidelacrosse.com/news/2010/07/12/iroquois-nationals-visa-issues-continue-immigration-cowboys-refuse-entry-team>international 
lacrosse communities, both of whom cited the hypocrisy of preventing 
the team from taking part in a world championship that honored the 
legacy of their ancestors and the game they invented.

Continue to check back to InsideLacrosse.com as we follow this 
developing story.





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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 12:13:51 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:13:51 -0700
Subject: [News] Iranian scientist claims US torture
Message-ID: <mailman.79.1279210448.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Iranian scientist claims US torture

Thursday, July 15, 2010
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/07/201071502034599551.html

Alireza Ronaghi reports from Tehran on Shahram Amiri's accusations of 
US torture

An Iranian man who said he was kidnapped by the US has arrived home 
in Tehran, vowing to reveal more details of his claimed abduction 
while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia last year.

Arriving back in Iran early on Thursday, Amiri, 32, flashed a victory 
sign as he was given a tearful welcome by relatives and friends at 
Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport.

Speaking to Al Jazeera during a transit stop in Qatar, Shahram Amiri 
said he was interrogated for 14 months by US agents who refused to 
allow him contact with his family, but that he "never cracked" and 
had not revealed any secret information about Iran's nuclear programme.

Washington has denied the claims, saying Amiri had lived freely in 
the US, had himself reached out to US officials, and was free to come and go.

Iranian authorities have repeatedly said that Amiri was seized by the 
CIA during a visit to Saudi Arabia last year, and Iran's state 
television has broadcast the text of what it said was an interview 
with him in which he claims he was abducted at gunpoint by US agents 
while attending the Hajj pilgrimage.

"They gave me a shot which made me unconscious and then transferred 
me to the US onboard a military plane," Amiri said in Tehran, before 
making allegations that he was tortured during interrogations in the US.

"Within the first two months, I was subjected to fierce mental and 
psychological torture by agents and interrogators from the US Central 
Intelligence Agency."

Speaking to Al Jazeera during his journey back to Iran, Amiri said he 
had been forced by US authorities to say in a video released on the 
internet that he was enjoying life in the state of Arizona.

Al Jazeera has not been able to independently verify Amiri's allegations.

'Help of the Saudis'

Amiri said he was "kidnapped with the help of the Saudis" and had 
been "put under a number of pressures" while held in the US.

He said he had been dropped off at the Iranian interests section of 
the Pakistan embassy in Washington on Monday after US agents decided 
they had no more need of him.

Amiri's disappearance has been linked to rising international 
pressure over Tehran's controversial nuclear programme, which Iran 
says is for peaceful purposes but many countries led by the United 
States say the country is pursuing atomic weapons.

"Behind the scenes this was politically motivated and in my time in 
the United States where I was held against my will, they asked me for 
a series of documents ... they wanted to use this as a claim against 
the Islamic Republic, so they could advance their own political 
agenda," Amiri told Al Jazeera.

Iran's semi-official Fars news agency, reporting on the case, said 
that Amiri had been handed over to the Pakistani embassy by US 
agents, calling it a defeat for US intelligence services.

"Because of Iran's media and intelligence activities, the American 
government had to back down and hand over Amiri to the embassy on 
Monday night," Fars said.

The disappearance of Amiri, who worked at a university linked with 
Iran's Revolutionary Guards, sparked accusations by Iranian officials 
that he had been kidnapped by the CIA.

US contact

Washington has denied the allegations as well as speculation in the 
US media that Amiri had defected to the US and was working with the CIA.

The speculation was further compounded when a man claiming to be 
Amiri was shown in two different pieces of video footage on June 7 - 
one claiming he was kidnapped by US agents and the other saying he 
was studying in the city of Tucson in Arizona.

These videos were followed by a third a few weeks later in which the 
man said he had escaped from the custody of US spies in Virginia.

US officials consistently denied Amiri's kidnapping but on Tuesday, 
PJ Crowley, the state department spokesman, confirmed that Washington 
had been in touch with him.

"The United States government has maintained contact with him," he 
said, adding that Amiri "has been here for some time, I'm not going 
to specify for how long".

Crowley also refused to comment on whether Amiri had provided 
Washington with intelligence.

But the Washington Post, citing US officials, reported on Thursday 
that Amiri was paid more than $5m by the CIA to provide information 
on Iran's nuclear programme.

Shrouded in mystery

Al Jazeera's Alireza Ronaghi, reporting from Tehran after attending a 
news conference addressed by Amiri, said: "It seems like the Iranians 
have finally decided to deny the assumption that Mr Amiri had any 
information that could reveal anything about Iran's nuclear programme 
to sort of try and lift all the possibilities about Amiri's 
importance that could probably lead to his defection."

Our correspondent said he had talked to Amiri's wife and even she did 
not know whether he was alive or dead.

"So no one knew what he has been doing apart from his own claims 
about what he had been doing and what happened to him," Ronaghi said.

"We have no other source or no other reliable commentary to get a 
glimpse of what he had been doing in the last couple of months, so it 
is very important for Iranian authorities to get to the bottom of it.

"Iranians have to go through very lengthy sessions with Amiri and 
that has just started."




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 12:24:23 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:24:23 -0700
Subject: [News] US university suspends Muslim student group for Palestine
 protest
Message-ID: <mailman.82.1279211085.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

US university suspends Muslim student group for Palestine protest

Brian Napoletano, The Electronic Intifada, 14 July 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11374.shtml


In response to intense political pressure by multiple pro-Zionist 
organizations, the administration at the University of California, 
Irvine (UCI) recently decided to suspend Muslim students' right to 
assemble and practice their faith together on campus. Alleging that 
emails anonymously "leaked" to the university prove that the Muslim 
Student Union was responsible for a protest of Israeli Ambassador 
Michael Oren's campus appearance by eight UCI students, the 
administration plans to suspend the more than 250-member Muslim 
Student Union for a year beginning in September, and place it under 
intense scrutiny and disciplinary probation if the student group is 
allowed to re-apply for recognition in the fall of 2011.

The student group is appealing this ban, contending that the MSU did 
not sponsor the protest, and that the students arrested for 
interrupting Oren's speech were acting as individuals. Members have 
also challenged UCI's decision to impose what their attorney Reem 
Salahi has described as "nothing but collective punishment" by 
suspending the entire group over a political protest.

Pointing to sustained efforts by powerful organizations like the 
Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Organization of America, many 
are contending that UCI is allowing outside organizations to decide 
how it treats its students. Many of these organizations have publicly 
described their role in pushing the administration to suspend the 
student group, and have announced their intentions to undertake 
similar efforts on other campuses where students are organizing in 
defense of Palestinian rights.

While delivering a presentation on US-Israeli relations in February, 
Oren was interrupted several times by students who were outraged by 
his disregard for human rights and his attacks on the UN-commissioned 
Goldstone report. As a previous military spokesman for Israel, Oren 
defended Israel's 2006 invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, its winter 
2008-09 attack on Gaza, and touted his own role as a paratrooper 
during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon in the mainstream media. 
Although Oren eventually finished his presentation, the university 
had the 11 students who interrupted him arrested (eight were from 
UCI, three were from UC Riverside), and the eight UCI students were 
subsequently brought before the University Office of Judicial 
Affairs, which informed them that they may face criminal charges in 
addition to any other punishments the university decides to impose. 
Although they are all members of the MSU, the students maintained 
that the protest was not a MSU activity, and that they were acting as 
individuals 
("<http://collegelife.freedomblogging.com/2010/02/08/israeli-ambassador-xxxx-at-uci/15647/>11 
Arrested for Disrupting Israeli Ambassador," The Orange County 
Register, 8 February 2010).

The university publicly condemned the students who protested and, in 
response to demands from the Jewish Federation Orange County (JFOC) 
and other organizations initiated a Student Judiciary Review of the 
MSU. While this review was underway, someone anonymously delivered a 
collection of emails and other documents to the JFOC, the 
Investigative Project on Terrorism and the UCI that they claimed to 
have hacked from the MSU's email account.

Despite its highly-suspect nature and unknown source, Lisa Cornish, 
head of the Judiciary Review and Senior Executive Director of Student 
Housing, based her findings almost exclusively on this "evidence" 
when she concluded that the MSU had violated parts of the Code of 
Conduct by "plan[ning] every detail of the disruptions" and then 
"covering up" its involvement by claiming that the protests were not 
an MSU activity. In her 27 May letter to the students, Cornish said 
that she planned to have the group's recognition revoked on 1 
September, require the members to complete fifty hours of community 
service, and have the group placed on disciplinary probation for an 
additional year if it was permitted to re-register in the fall of 
2011 
("<http://files.onset.freedom.com/ocregister/Oren_Decision_Document.pdf>Letter 
to Muslim Student Union Officers" [PDF]). She did not, however, 
comment on whether the university planned to file criminal charges 
against the eight students who were actually responsible for the protests.

In light of these possible criminal charges, MSU's attorney Salahi 
was unable to discuss the alleged evidence in detail. However, she 
maintained that the protesters were not acting on behalf of the MSU. 
She also said that much of the evidence presented was deeply flawed, 
and that the university's punishment was entirely inappropriate, 
arguing that "all Muslim students on campus have been punished for 
the actions of a few."

Salahi also pointed out the central role the MSU plays in the Muslim 
student community. While advocacy for Palestinian rights is one of 
their more frequently noticed activities, the MSU has also worked 
with different student and cultural groups on several social justice 
movements and community service projects. Last spring, UCI's Cross 
Cultural Center recognized the MSU's contribution to the university 
by awarding it the Social Justice Award.

The student group also facilitates daily and weekly prayers on 
campus, offers religious classes and organizes social events. Given 
its centrality to the Muslim student community, many students feel 
that their right to participate in the campus community as Muslims is 
being undermined. As newly-elected MSU President Asaad Triana 
observed, "depriving Muslim students a venue to associate jeopardizes 
their rights under the First Amendment and is an act of 
marginalization at a time when Muslim students and Muslim youth 
already feel besieged."

The university's decision to suspend the entire MSU has raised 
several questions about the role that outside pressure from several 
well-known anti-Palestinian organizations played in its decision. 
Husam Ayloush, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic 
Relations, observed that the disruption of Oren's speech "was nothing 
but a peaceful and symbolic protest of the Israeli ambassador at 
UCI," suggesting that the university's response "appears to be 
politically motivated to silence any future peaceful and legitimate 
criticism of Israel's brutal practices."

Much of this political motivation came from well-known Zionist 
organizations like the Jewish Federation Orange County (JFOC), the 
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Zionist Organization of America 
(ZOA) -- all of which openly demanded that the university suspend the 
entire student group after February's protest.

The JFOC began attacking the MSU for its alleged "anti-Semitism" when 
the student group first began publicly criticizing Israeli policy 
nearly a decade ago. The JFOC immediately allied with campus groups 
like Hillel to pressure the administration to silence criticism of 
Israel, claiming that it intimidated Jewish students. The JFOC soon 
partnered with the ADL, which began to put even more media and 
political pressure on the administration to take action against the MSU.

The ZOA also joined in the effort, and began pressuring various 
contacts within the University of California administration to 
suspend the MSU. In a personal letter to UC President Mark Yudof, for 
instance, ZOA President Morton Klein condemned the UCI's MSU along 
with the UC Santa Cruz's Committee for Justice in Palestine, and 
accused the chancellors of both universities of being "grossly 
deficient" in their efforts to silence criticism of Israel 
("<http://www.zoa.org//media/user/documents/Publ/letterUCPresidentYudof8Aug08.pdf>Letter 
to Mark Yudof, Re: UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz," 8 August 2008 [PDF]).

Outraged by the protests against Oren, virtually every Zionist 
organization involved began calling for the MSU's suspension in 
February. Although the ZOA placed itself at odds with several other 
organizations when it initiated a Jewish boycott of UCI, the 
different factions still managed to coordinate a fairly organized 
campaign to have the student group suspended.

The campaign against the MSU became so intense that its vice 
president, Hadeer Soliman, described it as an outright attack on the 
students' "most basic rights of Freedom of Association," and said 
that the MSU's antagonists are "not seeking justice but rather censorship."

As opposition to Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people 
continues to grow, its apologists in the United States are focusing 
more of their energy and resources on silencing dissent on college 
campuses. While personal attacks on faculty are fairly common, the 
only other time an entire student group has faced punishment for a 
political protest was when UC Berkeley temporarily suspended its 
Students for Justice in Palestine group during an investigation in 
2002. As MSU spokesperson Mahdis Keshavarz pointed out, the extent to 
which the university has allowed outside organizations to dictate its 
treatment of its students is both unprecedented and alarming. "By 
allowing an outside institution to come onto campus and influence its 
students standing," she explained, "UCI is failing to protect them 
and setting a dangerous precedent."

Such a precedent appears to be exactly what supporters of Israel are 
hoping for, as many of the organizations involved expressed their 
conviction that the MSU's suspension will have a significant impact 
on other campuses. In its press release, the ZOA said the ruling 
"sends a powerful message to other colleges and universities ... 
making it clear that this bigotry against Jews and the Jewish State 
will not be tolerated" 
("<http://www.jewishorangecounty.org/page.aspx?id=222251> Muslim 
Student Union Suspended at UC Irvine"). The subtext to this message, 
it seems, is that all pretenses of academic freedom on the nation's 
campuses have finally been discarded, and further objections to 
Israeli apartheid will be met with swift retaliation.

Describing the UCI's vilification of its Muslim students as yet 
another "criminalization of Arab and Muslim political speech which 
has permeated the American university system in defiance of 
principles of racial and religious equality," the US Campaign for the 
Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel recently released a statement 
of solidarity that condemned the administration's attack on students' 
"rights of free speech" and calling on them to "restore the integrity 
of the academy" by repealing its ban 
("<http://usacbi.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/statement-condemning-disciplinary-action-against-the-irvine-11-and-the-recommendation-to-suspend-the-uc-irvine-muslim-student-union/>Statement 
Condemning Disciplinary Action against the Irvine 11 ...," 13 July 2010).

UCI's decision to punish one of its student groups for a political 
protest is a direct threat to academic freedom and the right of 
students to organize and speak freely. As more right-wing 
organizations begin to target the academy, students in other social 
justice movements may soon find themselves under attack by outside 
organizations. While the precedent set by the UCI's decision could 
intimidate some students into submission, others may respond by 
building stronger solidarity with students engaged in different and 
related struggles for social justice at home and abroad.

Brian Napoletano is a member of the International Socialist 
Organization and the former Public Relations officer for Purdue 
University Students for Justice in Palestine. He has previously 
written for The Palestine Chronicle, MRZine, and Socialist Worker. He 
can be reached via email at b.napoletano A T gmail D O T com.





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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 16:22:41 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:22:41 -0700
Subject: [News] Danziger Bridge is Just the Beginning: NOPD Corruption and
 Violence
Message-ID: <mailman.92.1279225383.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Danziger Bridge is Just the Beginning

Six New Orleans Police Charged in Post-Katrina Killings, Activists 
Say Deeper Change is Needed

By Jordan Flaherty, <http://floodlines.org>floodlines.org
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-flaherty/six-new-orleans-police-ch_b_647771.html

This week, federal officials charged six current and former New 
Orleans police officers in connection with the killing of civilians 
in the days after Hurricane Katrina. The six are not only accused of 
murder but also of conspiring to hide their crime through secret 
meetings, planting evidence, inventing witnesses, false arrests, and 
perjury. Four of the officers may face the death penalty.

While the details of their charges are shocking, much of the media 
has missed the real story: corruption and violence are endemic to the 
NOPD, and wider systemic change is needed not just in police 
personnel, but in the city's overall criminal justice system.

Days of Violence

In the days after the flooding of New Orleans, police officers were 
told they were defending a city under siege and were given tacit 
permission to use deadly force at their own discretion. At the time, 
no one in power seemed to be interested in looking into the details 
of who was killed and why.

For more than three years, these post-Katrina murders were ignored by 
the city's District Attorney, the Republican U.S. Attorney, and even 
the local media. But in late 2008 ProPublica and The Nation published 
the results of an 18-month investigation by journalist A.C. Thompson. 
Under new leadership, and responding to requests from New Orleans 
advocates, the Department of Justice began its own inquiries soon 
after Thompson's report.

FBI agents reconstructed crime scenes, interviewed witnesses and 
seized officers' computers. Disturbing revelations have continued to 
unfold since then, as the mounting evidence against them has forced a 
growing number of cops to confess.

Among the most shocking cases:

On September 2, four days after Katrina made landfall, Henry Glover 
was shot by one officer, then apparently taken hostage by other 
officers who either killed him directly or burned him alive. His 
charred remains were found weeks later.

Also on September 2, Danny Brumfield Sr., a 45 year old man stranded 
with his family at the New Orleans Convention Center, was 
deliberately hit by a patrol car, then shot in the back by police in 
front of scores of witnesses as he tried to wave down the officers to 
ask for help.

On September 4, 2005, on New Orleans' Danziger Bridge, a group of 
police officers drove up to several unarmed civilians who were 
fleeing their flooded homes and opened fire. Two people were killed, 
including a mentally challenged man named Ronald Madison, and four 
were seriously injured. Madison was shot in the back by officer 
Robert Faulcon, and officer Kenneth Bowen then rushed up and kicked 
and stomped on him, apparently until he was dead.

Faulcon and Bowen were among those charged this week in a 27-count 
indictment that lays out the disturbing chain of events on the bridge.

The post-Katrina killings have also led investigators into further 
inquiries. The feds have already announced that they are looking into 
at least eight cases, including incidents that occurred in the summer 
before Katrina and in the years after. And as high-ranking officers 
confess to manufacturing evidence, their confessions bring doubt to 
scores of other cases they have worked on.

Endemic Violence

A coalition of criminal justice activists called Community United for 
Change (CUC) has asked for federal investigations of dozens of other 
police murders committed over the past three decades, which advocates 
say have never been properly examined. Activists named a wide range 
of cases, from the death of 25-year-old Jenard Thomas, who was shot 
by police in front of his father on March 24, 2005; to Sherry 
Singleton, shot by police in 1980 while she was naked in a bathtub, 
in front of her four year old child.

Several parents and other family members of victims of police 
violence have joined in protests and community forums sponsored by 
CUC. The parents of Adolph Grimes III, who was shot 14 times by cops 
on New Year's day in 2009, are among those who have spoken out. "We 
want those officers incarcerated, so they can live with it like we 
live with it," said Grimes' father.

"This represents a real opportunity to raise some fundamental 
questions about the nature of police and what they do," said Malcolm 
Suber, project director with the New Orleans chapter of the American 
Friends Service Committee and one of the organizers who formed 
Community United for Change.

Civil rights attorney Tracie Washington has been among those leading 
the call for federal intervention in the department. "It is time for 
the U.S. government, through the Justice Department's Office of Civil 
Rights, to step in and step up," she said. "We need a solution that 
addresses the systemic nature of the problem."

Justice Department officials have indicated that they agree on the 
need for federal assistance. "Criminal prosecutions alone, I have 
learned, are not enough to change the culture of a police 
department," said Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu has also said he agrees on the need for federal 
supervision. In a letter to Attorney General Holder, Landrieu wrote, 
"It is clear that nothing short of a complete transformation is 
necessary and essential to ensure safety for the citizens of New Orleans."

However, many activists fear that Mayor Landrieu is speaking out in 
support of reform so he can maintain a level of control over the 
changes dictated by the feds. They are critical of Landrieu's choices 
so far, such as his selection of an insider - NOPD veteran Ronal 
Serpas - for the job of police chief, and have expressed concern that 
he will not break with the department's troubled history. "This is 
lukewarm reform," says Rosana Cruz, the associate director of 
V.O.T.E., an organization that seeks to build power and civic 
engagement for formerly incarcerated people. "This is reaching the 
lowest possible bar that we could possibly set."

Beyond Bad Apples

While some form of federal supervision of the department seems 
likely, Malcolm Suber doesn't think federal oversight is enough.

"I don't think that we can call on a government that murders people 
all over the world every day to come and supervise a local police 
department," He says. For Suber, federal control will not offer the 
wider, more systemic changes needed in other aspects of the system. 
While Suber wants more federal investigations of police murders, he 
wants these investigations to go hand in hand with community 
oversight and control of the department.

While activists may disagree on the role they see for the federal 
government, one thing Washington, Suber and Cruz agree on is that the 
problem runs deeper than police department corruption. They say any 
solution needs to reach beyond the department to other facets of the 
system like the city's elected coroner, the District Attorney's 
office, the U.S. Attorney and the city's Independent Police Monitor, 
who many see as limited by not having the ability to perform its own 
investigations.

"We have a coroner who always finds police were justified," said 
Suber, referring to Frank Minyard, an 80-year-old jazz trumpeter who 
is trained as a gynecologist. Minyard has been city coroner since 
1974, and has been the frequent subject of complaints from activists, 
who contend that he has mislabeled police killings. "We've had 
independent coroners, forensic doctors come after him," said Suber, 
"And we found that basically all of his finding were bogus. Just made up."

Henry Glover, last seen in the custody of police then found burned to 
death in a car, was not flagged by the coroner's office as a 
potential homicide. In another case now under federal investigation, 
witnesses say police beat Raymond Robair to death. The coroner ruled 
that he "fell down or was pushed." This "fall" broke four ribs and 
caused massive internal injury, including a ruptured spleen.

"If you ask any attorneys who have handled cases of police killings," 
continued Suber, "When they have hired independent doctors to go 
after our coroner, nine times out of ten he's wrong."

Activists also complain that the city's District Attorney Leon 
Cannizzaro has been slow to pursue cases of police violence. "The 
district attorney just does not file charges," Suber said. "When it's 
involving police, he finds no crimes committed." Republican US 
Attorney Jim Letten has also failed, Suber added. "A number of 
community groups have gone and met with him, asked him to investigate 
and he didn't do anything."

Organizers have put forward a range of proposals for the reforms they 
would like to see, including institutional support for community-led 
programs like CopWatch, the incorporation of a system for language 
interpretation, and a more powerful Independent Police Monitor. But 
they all agree that not just the department, but the entire system 
needs fundamental change, and that change needs to come from outside 
of city government. "How you gonna get the wolf to watch over the 
chicken coop?" asks Adolph Grimes, Jr. "It's the system itself that 
is corrupted."

An earlier version of this article originally appeared on 
<http://www.colorlines.com/archives/2010/05/the_long_rap_sheet_of_new_orleans_cops.html>colorlines.com.

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and 
a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first 
writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and 
his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in 
a range of outlets including the New York Times, Mother Jones, and 
Argentina's Clarin newspaper. He has produced news segments for 
Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now! and appeared as a guest on 
CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, and Keep Hope Alive with the 
Reverend Jesse Jackson. Haymarket Books has just released his new 
book, FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena 
Six. He can be reached at 
<mailto:neworleans at leftturn.org>neworleans at leftturn.org.

More information about Floodlines can be found at 
<http://floodlines.org/>floodlines.org.  Floodlines will also be 
featured on the Community and Resistance Tour this fall. For more 
information on the tour, see 
<http://communityandresistance.wordpress.com/>communityandresistance.wordpress.com.





Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 18:10:46 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:10:46 -0700
Subject: [News] A New Wave of Criminalization Against Social Movements in
 Ecuador
Message-ID: <mailman.103.1279231984.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

A New Wave of Criminalization Against Social Movements in Ecuador


Written by Jennifer Moore
Wednesday, 14 July 2010 17:51
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2590-a-new-wave-of-criminalization-against-social-movements-in-ecuador-

[]
Ecuador's anti-mining and indigenous movements 
are denouncing renewed attempts by the Correa 
Administration to criminalize dissent. Over 
thirty people, including top leaders of the 
national indigenous movement, are being 
investigated for allegations including terrorism 
and sabotage as a result of their participation 
in protests related to controversies over gold 
and copper mining, as well as water and indigenous rights.

President of the Confederation of Indigenous 
Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) Marlon Sant? 
and several others were summoned just days after 
a Summit of the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) was 
held in northern Ecuador at which indigenous 
rights were at the top of the agenda. The CONAIE 
protested the June 24 and 25 summit, questioning 
why ALBA would address indigenous rights without 
representation from important indigenous organizations such as theirs.

Coming on the heels of an eleven-day march from 
the Amazon to the capital of Quito in 
commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the 
first major indigenous uprising in Ecuador, 
several thousand people participated. They wanted 
to deliver a communiqu? to indigenous President 
Evo Morales of Bolivia who was present for the 
ALBA meeting, detailing their concerns about 
being excluded, as well as worries about 
market-based solutions to climate change and 
continued dependence on extractive industry that 
President Correa is pursuing and which they fear 
puts at risk at risk the lives and livelihoods of 
affected indigenous and campesino communities. 
When it became clear that they would not be able 
to meet with Morales, they retreated and gathered in a nearby park.

According to lawyer and professor Mario Melo, who 
cites documents pertaining to the preliminary 
investigation, Sant? and others have been accused 
of terrorism and sabotage for breaking through a 
police line and for a pair of handcuffs that 
allegedly went missing during the scuffle. 
Incredulous that this would be enough to warrant 
a charge of terrorism, Melo believes that the 
criminal investigations are meant ?to intimidate 
and demobilize the organizations and their leaders.? (1)

National Assembly Member of the indigenous 
Pachakutik party Lourdes Tib?n also questioned 
how it is possible that the indigenous leaders 
could be charged in this way when the National 
Assembly just passed a resolution to declare June 
21st a civic day of commemoration for ?the great 
contributions that the indigenous movement has 
made over the last twenty years.? She recalls a 
situation from 2007 in which a provincially 
elected leader from the Pachakutik party was 
similarly charged following protests related to 
redistribution of oil revenue and then later found innocent. (2)

Marlon Sant? calls the rationale for the 
investigations ?ridiculous,? but affirms that he 
will participate in the legal process. (3) He 
adds, however, that ?there are underlying issues 
to be debated and we won't be silenced by these 
investigations.? (4) Tensions between the 
national government and the national indigenous 
movement have been building over the last couple 
of years. In recent months, the CONAIE, in 
alliance with other indigenous organizations 
including the National Federation of Indigenous, 
Campesino and Afro-Ecuadorian Organizations 
(FENOCIN) and the Ecuadorian Federation of 
Evangelical Indigenous (FEINE), have been in an 
ongoing dispute with the national government and 
legislative assembly over a proposed new water law. (5)

For his part, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa 
accuses the indigenous leaders of violence, 
saying, ?It's impossible to dialogue with [such 
people].? Although Correa spearheaded the 
Declaration of Otavalo, (6) signed by ALBA 
leaders, which promises to build societies that 
respect the rights of indigenous peoples and 
those of African descent and which ratifies their 
commitment to the UN Declaration on the Rights of 
Indigenous Peoples, he dismisses CONAIE's 
demands, saying they just want to bring him down. 
He warned CONAIE's leadership against 
interpreting their charges as political 
persecution and says, ?Here, like in Venezuela 
and Bolivia, there are various groups conspiring against our governments.? (7)

The number of people facing serious criminal 
investigations, however, has grown in recent 
weeks. In addition to national indigenous leaders 
under investigation, about thirty activists and 
community leaders in central and southern 
provinces are being processed for similarly grave 
allegations in relation to longstanding conflicts 
with Canadian- and now Chinese-financed gold and 
mining companies. In two cases, charges of 
terrorism and sabotage pertain to recent protests 
against gold mining operations. Another case from 
2006-2007 involving twenty activists was also reopened.

Going back on past advances

The situation represents a step back for the 
small Andean nation that enshrined the right to 
protest, rights for nature and the right to water 
within its 2008 Political Constitution. It is 
also fitting to recall that the National 
Constituent Assembly granted amnesty in March 
2008 to over 350 activists facing a range of 
criminal charges as a result of their opposition 
to mining, oil and hydroelectric projects. 
Political allies, however, such as then President 
of the National Constituent Assembly Alberto 
Acosta, who helped bring about the amnesty and 
who backed struggles for expanded rights within 
the constitution, have grown distant from 
Correa's Alianza Pa?z (Country Alliance) political movement.

Ecuadorian human rights and environmental 
organizations deemed March 14, 2008, when the 
National Constituent Assembly issued the amnesty, 
a ?transcendental day.? (8) The then Constituent 
Assembly President Alberto Acosta called the 
decision ?a very clear message that the 
manipulation of the justice system in order to 
exert pressure on certain social processes cannot 
be permitted.? (9) The official press release 
referred to activists as ?compatriots? who are 
?leading protests in defense of their communities 
and nature, in the face of natural resource 
exploitation projects.? (10) Today, Alberto 
Acosta, also past Minister of Mines and Energy 
under Correa, calls accusations of terrorism and 
sabotage against activists, ?tremendously 
shameful,? adding that ?they have no basis in 
justice or a democratic judicial system.? (11)

Also under renewed threat are organizations that 
support social movements who question the 
country's economic development model. In March 
2009, the Quito-based environmental organization 
Acci?n Ecol?gica (Ecological Action) had its 
doors temporarily closed when the government 
revoked its legal status, sparking national and 
international outcry. More recently, during a 
national radio address earlier this month, Correa 
issued a new warning to organizations that 
receive international support: ?These little 
gringos (North Americans) come here with their 
bellies full to convince the indigenous that they 
shouldn't extract oil, nor operate mines. They 
give them money, achieve their goal and then go, 
leaving the indigenous more poor than ever 
before.? Correa suggested that those who 
intervene in the indigenous movement's struggle 
could be expelled from the country. (12)

Correa's suggestion that Ecuador will be left 
impoverished without mining echoes earlier public 
relations campaigns by Canadian-financed mining 
companies in Ecuador, such as Corriente Resources 
(recently sold to a Chinese joint venture) whose 
?Fair Deal? and ?Poor without Copper? slogans 
were once broadcast on prime-time television and 
distributed with in national publications. The 
difference today is that Correa promotes greater 
state control and redistribution of benefits.

Vague promises that gold and copper mining will 
be environmentally responsible, however, still 
fail to reassure indigenous and non-indigenous 
communities at the local level who are concerned 
about the potential impacts of gold and copper 
mining on forests and water, and thus on their 
lives and livelihoods. In other words, they 
believe that with mining they could be 
impoverished. ?I?ve heard Rafael Correa?s 
discourse,? said Marlon Sant? in a recent 
interview with Canadian researcher Jeffrey R. 
Webber, ?that we?re sitting on a mountain of gold 
and that it would be stupid not to exploit it. 
But this is short-term thinking, thinking only in 
the present. What about our future?? (13)

Entrenches conflicts

Unfortunately, rather than helping to address 
points of difference over natural resource 
management between the indigenous movement and 
the central government, and between local 
conflicts and national economic imperatives, the 
current wave of criminal investigations against 
social movement leaders like Sant? represents a 
further entrenchment of these conflicts. With the 
balance of power currently in state and company 
hands, whereas mining companies for instance are 
guaranteed protection of their operations under 
the new mining law, these accusations serve to 
marginalize the voices of indigenous and 
campesino organizations that historically have 
had to struggle for any rights that they have 
won, urging them to keep fighting.

Jennifer Moore is a Canadian independent 
journalist who has been reporting from Ecuador for several years.

Notes:
    * Melo, Mario, 1 July 2010, ?Organizaciones 
Ind?genas ecuatorianas en indagaci?n previa por el delito de terrorismo?
    * CONAIE, July 1st 2010, ?Pachakutik denuncia 
criminalizaci?n del movimiento ind?gena?
    * CONAIE, July 1st 2010, Video recording of 
press conference; 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghx_Zkj5Wgs>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghx_Zkj5Wgs 

    * CONAIE, July 7th 2010, Video recording of 
press conference in Quito, Ecuador; 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1Bnt4TBFHM>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1Bnt4TBFHM 

    * See Upside Down World, May 7th 2010, 
?Ecuador: The Debate in the Streets? 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2483-ecuador-the-debate-in-the-streets->http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2483-ecuador-the-debate-in-the-streets- 
and Upside Down World, May 18th 2010, ?Decision 
delayed over Ecuador's new water law? 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2495--decision-delayed-over-ecuadors-new-water-law>http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2495--decision-delayed-over-ecuadors-new-water-law<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2495--decision-delayed-over-ecuadors-new-water-law> 
for more information
    * ALBA, June 25th 2010, ?Declaraci?n de 
Otavalo: Cumbre ALBA-TCP con Autoridades 
Indigenas y Afrodescendientes?; 
<http://www.alianzabolivariana.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6544>http://www.alianzabolivariana.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6544 

    * El Ciudadano, June 26th 2010, ?Presidente 
Correa; El di?logo est? agotado con la dirigencia 
ind?gena?; 
<http://www.elciudadano.gov.ec/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14317:presidente-correa-el-dialogo-esta-agotado-con-cierta-dirigencia-indigena&catid=1:actualidad&Itemid=42>http://www.elciudadano.gov.ec/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14317:presidente-correa-el-dialogo-esta-agotado-con-cierta-dirigencia-indigena&catid=1:actualidad&Itemid=42 

    * Ecumenical Human Rights Commission (CEDHU), 
Accion Ecologica and the Regional Foundation for 
Human Rights Assistance (INREDH), March 14th 2008, ?Carta de Reconocimiento?
    * Alberto Acosta, March 13th 2008, Press conference
    * Sala de Prensa Jose Peralta, March 14th 
2008, Boletin 633, ?Alrededor de 357 ciudadanos 
se beneficiaron de este recurso?
    * Upside Down World. Jeffrey R. Webber, July 
12th 2010, ?Ecuador's Economy Under Rafael 
Correa: Twenty-First Century Socialism or the New 
Extractivism? - An Interview with Alberto 
Acosta?; 
<http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2586-ecuadors-economy-under-rafael-correa-twenty-first-century-socialism-or-the-new-extractivism--an-inteview-with-alberto-acosta>http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2586-ecuadors-economy-under-rafael-correa-twenty-first-century-socialism-or-the-new-extractivism--an-inteview-with-alberto-acosta 

    * Hoy, July 10th 2010, ?ONGs que intervengan 
en pol?tica ser?n expulsadas, dice Correa?; 
<http://www.hoy.com.ec/noticias-ecuador/ongs-que-intervengan-en-politica-seran-expulsadas-dice-correa-418108.html>http://www.hoy.com.ec/noticias-ecuador/ongs-que-intervengan-en-politica-seran-expulsadas-dice-correa-418108.html 

    * Global Research, Jeffrey R. Webber, July 
13th 2010, ?Indigenous Struggle, Ecology, and 
Capitalist Resource Extraction in Ecuador?; 
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20118>http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20118 





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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 15 19:40:38 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:40:38 -0700
Subject: [News] Hold on to Your Hats: This Thing's Gonna Blow!
Message-ID: <mailman.108.1279237262.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


Published on This Can't Be Happening 
(<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net>http://www.thiscantbehappening.net)


Hold on to Your Hats: This Thing's Gonna Blow!

By Anonymous
Created 07/15/2010 - 15:34
by:
Dave LIndorff

What the hell are they thinking in Washington, and down at the 
"Unified Command" in New Orleans, letting BP try to close off the oil 
volcano spewing out the top of the damaged Blowout Preventer (BOP) stack?

And what the hell is the mainstream press doing not asking about the 
clear evidence of oil or gas spewing out under pressure from cracks 
in the seafloor around the base of the BOP? (See the image of oil 
spewing from the sea floor 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2RxIQP0IBU%E2%80%9D>here 
[1].)

Sure the initial partial closing of the valves is working, but they 
haven't built up much pressure yet, and a lot could go wrong. 
seriously wrong, and there's good reason to think it will.

I made a call to the media office of the Unified Command, the office 
set up to respond to public and media inquiries about the disaster, 
which is supposedly composed of people from the US Coast Guard, other 
federal agencies, and BP. When I mentioned the videos taken by BP's 
own remote operating vehicles (ROVs) of the oil and/or gas spewing 
from cracks in the sea floor, I was told I had to call the press 
office in Houston, "because you're asking us a question about the 
sub-surface well."

But here's the thing. The press office in Houston is not run by the 
Unified Command. The people at the office there answer the phone with 
the phrase: "BP Press." They do this because they are BP employees, 
and the office is in BP headquarters.

This means if you want to know anything about the structural 
integrity of the well below the BOP, you have to get that information 
from BP, not from the government. That's the same BP that told 
government regulators that they could handle any emergency. The same 
BP that assured us when the well blew that the spill was just leaking 
1000 barrels of oil a day--a figure that appears to have been 
knowingly understated by a factor of 50 to 100.

Now, when I called BP I got a PR guy with a Brit accent named Toby 
Odone, who claimed he was "not aware of any oil leaking around the 
well itself."

He also said, "We're pretty certain that there is no oil leaking 
around the well that shouldn't be there."

How then to explain their own ROV videos, showing exactly that? Odone 
assured me he'd "get back" with an answer. So far, no answer.

Odone also said something else that was disturbing in its facileness. 
He said that the relief wells were within feet of the original bore, 
and that they had "not detected any hydrocarbons." This, he assured 
me, meant that there was no leak from the casing. But I pointed out 
that those side wells had been drilled from a mile away, on a slant, 
so that they only approached the original well during the last 
quarter mile or so from the bottom of the 18000-foot bore. They were 
nowhere near the bore during the first several miles of casing, so 
they can offer no clue as to the integrity of the bore above the 
first quarter mile or so above the oil reservoir. Odone agreed that 
this was true.

I also put a call in to the US Energy Department, which is supposedly 
monitoring the science of this disaster and which put the attempted 
shut-down of the well on hold for 48 hours earlier this week while 
seismic tests were conducted to try and determine the integrity of 
the casing that goes from the BOP down to the oil reservoir. A press 
officer at the DOE asked me to provide a link to the ROV video of the 
oil leaking from the sea bed, and promised to get back to me with an 
explanation of the department's thinking about that. So far, no 
response or explanation. Clearly, though, the Energy Department is 
worried that shutting down the flow entirely at the top of the stack 
could cause such high pressures inside the casing that it will blow a 
crack in the pipe and allow the oil and gas to push upward outside of 
the control of the pipe.

That's why they are closing the top of the pipe slowly, monitoring 
the pressure all the time. If they can shut it down and the pressure 
rises to 9000 lbs/square inch or more, which is roughly the pressure 
at which the oil is coming up from below ground, then they will know 
that the integrity of the pipe has been preserved, but if they cannot 
get the pressure to build beyond 6000 or so lbs/square inch, it would 
mean that the casing has been compromised, and they would not be able 
to shut the flow down from the top. leaving successful completion of 
a relief well as the only possible shut-down option.

But here's the question: If we can already see oil, or perhaps gas, 
blowing out of cracks around the BOP, doesn't this mean that 
somewhere below ground, the casing has already breached? And if it 
has already blown open, isn't any attempt to shut down the flow and 
build up the pressure in the well just threatening to worsen whatever 
break already exists? Especially since BP and the government say that 
this "fix," even if it works and doesn't blow the tube or burst the 
damaged BOP, is only a temporary fix, until the relief well is 
drilled and the well is plugged at the bottom. Meanwhile, instead of 
this risky attempt to shut the well at the top, they could be just 
attaching pipes to collect all the oil in tankers on the surface, at 
minimal risk to the wellhead and the casing.

Why isn't the Energy Department or the Coast Guard addressing this 
question of the threat to the well? Why has no reporter at the 
regular daily briefings hosted by retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen 
asked this question?

It seems to me a fairly safe prediction that as they crank shut the 
opening at the top of the well, the oil pushing up from below at 9000 
lbs/square inch of pressure, or even 6000 lbs/square inch of 
pressure, is going to push through whatever leaks already exist in or 
around the well casing, and will be blowing up through the ground 
around the BOP. If it's bursting out through those cracks already, 
while the pipe is wide open, there should be little doubt that it 
will burst out even more powerfully when the top of the pipe is 
capped. That's grade-school physics.

And if things do go badly, as the oil and gas blow out of the casing 
and push their way up through the fractured well hole and the poorly 
set concrete that was put down there by Halliburton to fill the well 
bore, it will widen the pathways to the surface, probably following 
new fracture lines that will have it coming out even further from the 
well hole. In no time, we will have oil spewing from a wide are of 
sea floor which will make it impossible to collect.

I don't claim to be a geologist, engineer or oil well expert, and I 
don't want to be an alarmist, but having seen the images of oil 
spewing up from the sea floor, I have enough basic scientific 
understanding to know that the casing has to have been already 
breached, and that anything that increases the pressure on that 
damaged casing is only going to make things worse.

So why are they trying to close down the well from the top?

I'm just asking, because nobody else seems to be.

----------
Source URL: 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/139>http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/139

Links:
[1] http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2RxIQP0IBU"




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 16 10:25:22 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:25:22 -0700
Subject: [News] Open Letter to the Justice for Oscar Grant Movement: Next
 Steps, Strategy and Unity
Message-ID: <mailman.124.1279290349.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


<http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2010/07/open-letter-to-justice-for-oscar-grant.html>http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2010/07/open-letter-to-justice-for-oscar-grant.html



Thursday, July 15, 2010




<http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2010/07/open-letter-to-justice-for-oscar-grant.html>An 
Open Letter to the Justice for Oscar Grant 
Movement: Suggestions on Next Steps, Strategy and Unity Building

By Kali Akuno
National Organizer - Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Director of Education, Training, and Field Operations ? US Human Rights Network

The righteous anger and indignation on graphic 
display in Oakland, California Thursday, July 8th 
at the mockery of justice rewarded to Johannes 
Mehserle for murdering Oscar Grant and the open 
collaboration of several non-profit organizations 
with the government to contain and delegitimatize 
the people?s resistance is a clarion call. It?s a 
call not just for justice for Oscar Grant and the 
countless victims of police terror, but for 
radical, systemic change. The anger, and its 
focus, indicates a heightened awareness on behalf 
of a new generation of working class Black, 
Latino and Asian youth of the intractable 
contradictions between the imperialist state and 
oppressed peoples and the willingness to challenge them.

A new phase of development and a new set of 
challenges now confront the movement to win 
justice for Oscar Grant. The inexperience of the 
youth forces engaged and the current weaknesses 
and fragmentation of the left make this a very, 
very delicate time. If certain conversations 
aren?t had, if certain lessons of the past and 
present aren?t incorporated, and if certain 
contradictions aren?t addressed, then all of the 
radiant energy on display July 8th could easily 
fade, or just as easily turn its wrath in upon 
itself and miss its true target.

This small contribution is an attempt to help 
ignite conversation, share reflections from 
critical movements of the past, and offer 
suggestions in the hope of helping to facilitate 
strategic and programmatic development within the movement.

On Next Steps and Organizing Orientation
1. Joint Reflection: to move the Justice for 
Oscar Grant Movement forward progressive forces 
focused on building the democratic mass movement, 
should join forces and come together to assess 
the strengths and weaknesses of the Justice for 
Oscar Grant Movement over the past year and half. 
One of the two main objectives of such a 
collaboration, in the short term, would be to 
produce a joint assessment and a unified set of 
demands, both tactical and strategic, to help 
anchor the movement in its next phase of struggle.
2. Joint Assessment: This assessment should be 
issued as a statement and/or document that 
provides a clear analysis of the movements 
weaknesses and errors and some strong points of 
orientation to try and anchor, sustain, and guide 
it going forward. Some key points of assessment 
should include (but not be limited to) the following:
a) A firm condemnation of collaboration and 
opportunism; but avoiding personalized 
vilification of the social forces that 
collaborated (being mindful of the lessons of COINTELPRO)
b) A statement of distinction on the role of 
political and community organizations as opposed 
to non-profits; and clarity on the reformist 
orientation and political limitations of non-profit organizations
c) The function of organization in the movement 
to combat infiltration (as appears to have 
occurred within the Black Bloc and other formations)
d) The need for strategy to help facilitate 
forward development and political advancement of the movement(s)
3. Joint Strategy and Work Plan: The second 
primary objective of such a collaboration would 
be to draft a one-year strategy and work plan to 
realize the unified demands that are put forward 
to the movement to democratically accept 
(understanding the independence of initiative of 
each formation), modify, or categorically reject.

This convergence of forces, although necessarily 
centered in California, particularly the Bay Area 
and Los Angeles, should seek to build and 
consolidate a national and international organizing initiative.

On Demand Expansion and Development
1. The opening of a Federal Investigation by the 
Department of Justice (DOJ) can and should be 
used as a national organizing opportunity. 
However, more self-determining justice 
initiatives should be organized simultaneously to 
challenge US hegemony (internally and externally) 
by internationalizing the struggle. More 
concretely, an independent ?people?s or citizens? 
commission should be established to conduct an 
autonomous examination of the evidence, issue 
indictments, and pressure the DOJ and its 
process. This commission would ideally consist of 
family members, community activists, lawyers, 
jurists, etc. and call on various international 
bodies within the United Nations (UN) and 
International System (such as the Inter-American 
Court) to intervene in the case and challenge the 
racist policies and practices that enabled it.
2. The demand for resources and economic 
development must be supported unequivocally, but 
modified in a manner that puts limits on the 
controls of City Hall and its near exclusive 
access by ?grasstop? forces. A means to 
accomplishing this (not without its faults or 
limits by any stretch) could be the 
institutionalization of participatory budgeting 
systems to determine the use of the cities 
resources to ensure they are used to address and 
service human needs such as adequate housing, health care, education, etc.

Synthesis Demands
This synthesis is an attempt to combine and 
expand on the demands originally articulated by 
the African People?s Socialist Party (APSP), By 
Any Means Necessary (BAMN) Coalition, and the New Years Movement (NYM).
1. We demand that Officers Pirone and Domenici be indicted for murder.
2. We demand civil restitution and reparations 
for the family Oscar Grant, and the victims of 
Police violence by the OPD and BART.
3. We demand that BART Police be disarmed and disbanded.
4. We demand that the Police Bill of Rights, 
which shields the records of police misconduct, 
abuse and murder, be immediately abolished, and 
that all police records be made public.
5. We demand that an independent ?peoples 
commission?, drawn and determined by the citizens 
of Oakland, with international jurists determined 
by this commission, be granted oversight into the 
Federal Department of Justice investigation of 
the murder of Oscar Grant, and systemic 
violations of civil and human rights by the Oakland and Transit Police.
6. We demand the termination of all Gang 
Injunction laws and policies in Oakland and 
throughout California on the grounds of their 
unconstitutionality and their violation of civil and international law.
7. We demand that Oakland be declared a sanctuary 
city, and that all ICE raids and racial profiling 
policies and practices targeting Latino/a, Black, 
Asian and other oppressed peoples be terminated immediately.
8. We demand that the City of Oakland, the State 
of California, and the Federal Government provide 
massive funding for education and jobs in Oakland 
that are allocated and distributed via a 
transparent and democratic public participatory budgeting process.

One-Year Plan Targets/Tactics
1. Conduct a mass and coordinated non-compliance 
action in Oakland and Los Angeles the day after 
Mehserle?s sentencing, that calls for Student 
walk outs and strike or ?sick out? actions by 
Public Sector, Transit, Dock, and other workers 
that disrupts the regular flow of ?business? to 
raise our demands and demonstrate the power of mass action.
2. Organize broad, neighborhood Police/Copwatch 
formations, and work to create ?liberated zones? 
in Black, Latino, Asian, and white working class 
and poor communities, where the police are 
prohibited or curtailed in their activities.
3. Organize a massive local, regional, statewide, 
and national ?Justice for Oscar Grant? petition 
drive to pressure the DOJ and build support for 
the movement?s demands (buttressed by broad 
internet and social networking interface to support and broaden reach).
4. Develop a broad people?s media and cultural 
workers initiative to provide educational, 
motivational, and agitation tools and resources 
for the movement and to provide sufficient 
analysis and coverage to frame the movement from 
its own perspective and counter the reactionary 
framing and attacks of the bourgeois media.
5. Hold a People?s Tribunal, with international 
observers and jurists, to pressure the DOJ and its deliberations.
6. Utilize Inter-American and United Nations 
special action procedures and special rapporteurs 
to conduct international investigations, 
recommendations, and sanctions on the US 
government for its failure to protect the human 
rights of Oscar Grant, the victims of police 
violence, and the targets of the various racial 
profiling laws and policies sanctioned by the government.
7. Organize local, state and national referendum 
and legislative initiatives to realize and 
support the movement?s demands. A possible start 
could entail running progressive candidates in 
Oakland who stand on a platform based on the 
movement?s demands in the upcoming elections to 
help define public debate and pressure the government to comply.

Without a doubt, accomplishing all of this is a 
tall order, particularly for a young and 
fragmented movement. But, as the history of the 
peoples? struggles against white supremacy, 
colonialism, and imperialism here and all over 
the world demonstrate, no political challenges 
are insurmountable. If we dare to win, then we 
must dare to struggle against the internal 
shortcomings and subjectivities of the movement 
that hinder us from building the operational 
unity needed to execute initiatives of scale such 
as those proposed in this paper. The struggle for 
unity does not mean that we should stop 
struggling against collaborationist and 
opportunist ideas and practices. It simply 
implores us to do all we can to seize the 
opportunities at hand. With organization, 
strategy, discipline, and determination we can and will win!

In Unity and Struggle.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Kali can be contacted via kaliakuno at gmail.com.





Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 16 12:16:48 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:16:48 -0700
Subject: [News] US buying the Press in Venezuela
Message-ID: <mailman.132.1279297026.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Buying the Press - Venezuela

http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/07/documents-reveal-multimillion-dollar.html

By Eva Golinger
Documents reveal multimillion-dollar funding to 
journalists and media in Venezuela

US State Department documents declassified under 
the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) evidence 
more than $4 million USD in funding to 
journalists and private media in Venezuela during 
the last three years. This funding is part of the 
more than $40 million USD international agencies 
are investing annually in anti-Chavez groups in 
Venezuela in an attempt to provoke regime change

The funding has been channeled directly by the 
State Department through three US agencies: 
Panamerican Development Foundation (PADF), 
Freedom House, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

In a blatant attempt to hide their activities, 
the State Department has censored the names of 
organizations and journalists receiving these 
multimillion-dollar funds. However, one document 
dated July 2008 mistakenly left unveiled the 
names of the principal Venezuelan groups 
receiving the funds: Espacio Publico (Public 
Space) and Instituto de Prensa y Sociedad 
(Institute for Press and Society ?IPYS?).

Espacio Publico and IPYS are the entities charged 
with coordinating the distribution of the 
millions in State Department funds to private 
media outlets and Venezuelan journalists working to promote US agenda.

The documents evidence that PADF has implemented 
programs in Venezuela dedicated to ?enhancing 
media freedom and democratic institutions? and 
training workshops for journalists in the 
development and use of ?innovative media 
technologies?, due to the alleged ?threats to 
freedom of expression? and ?the climate of 
intimidation and self-censorship among journalists and the media?.

According to the documents, PADF?s objective is 
to ?strengthen independent journalists by 
providing them with training, technical 
assistance, materials and greater access to 
innovative internet-based technologies that 
expand and diversify media coverage and increase 
their capacity to inform the public on a timely 
basis about the most critical policy issues impacting Venezuela?.

However, while on paper this may appear benign, 
in reality, Venezuela?s corporate media outlets 
and journalists, together with US agencies, 
actively manipulate and distort information in 
order to portray the Venezuelan government as a 
?communist dictatorship? that ?violates basic human rights and freedoms?.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only do media and journalists in Venezuela 
have a near-absolute freedom of expression, 
during the past decade, under the Chavez 
administration, hundreds of new media outlets, 
many community-based, have been created in order 
to foster and expand citizens? access to media. 
Community media was prohibited under prior 
governments, which only gave broadcasting access 
to corporations willing to pay big money to 
maintain information monopolies in the country.

Today, corporate media outlets and their 
journalists use communications power to publicly 
promote the overthrow of the Venezuelan 
government. The owners and executives of these 
media corporations form part of the Venezuelan 
elite that, under the reigns of Washington, ran 
the country for forty years before Chavez won the presidency in 1998.

What these documents demonstrate is that 
Washington not only is funding Venezuelan media, 
in clear violation of laws that prohibit this 
type of ?propaganda? and ?foreign interference?, 
but also is influencing the way Venezuelan 
journalists perceive their profession and their political reality.

The State Department funding not only is used to 
create and aid media outlets that promote 
anti-Chavez propaganda, but also to capture 
Venezuelan journalists at the core - as students 
? in order to shape their vision of journalism 
and ensure their loyalty early on to US agenda.

FUNDING FOR ANTI-CHAVEZ WEB PAGES

One of the PADF programs, which received $699,996 
USD from the State Department in 2007, ?supported 
the development of independent media in 
Venezuela? and ?journalism via innovative media 
technologies?. The documents evidence that more 
than 150 Venezuelan journalists were trained by 
US agencies and at least 25 web pages were created with US funding.

During the past two years, there has been a 
proliferation of web pages, blogs, and Twitter, 
MySpace and Facebook users in Venezuela, the 
majority of whom use these media outlets to 
promote anti-Chavez messages and disseminate 
distorted and false information about the 
country?s political and economic reality.

Other programs run by the State Department have 
selected Venezuelan students and youth to receive 
training in the use of these new media 
technologies in order to create what they call a 
?network of cyber-dissidents? against the Venezuelan government.

For example, in April 2010, the George W. Bush 
Institute, together with Freedom House and the 
State Department, organized an encounter of 
?activists for freedom and human rights? and 
?experts in Internet? to analyze the ?global 
movement of cyber-dissidents?. Rodrigo Diamanti, 
anti-Chavez youth activist, was present at the 
event, which took place in Dallas, Texas and was 
presided over by George W. Bush himself, along 
with ?dissidents? invited from Iran, Syria, Cuba, Russia and China.

In October last year, Mexico City hosted the II 
Summit of the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), 
an organization created by the State Department 
to bring together select youth activists from 
countries of strategic importance to the US, 
along with the founders of new media technologies 
and representatives from different US agencies. 
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presided over 
the event, and anti-Chavez youth activists Yon 
Goicochea (Primero Justicia), Rafael Delgado, and 
Geraldine Alvarez, attended as special guests. 
All three are members of Futuro Presente, an 
organization created in Venezuela in 2008 with 
funding from the Cato Institute in Washington.

FUNDING TO UNIVERSITIES

The declassified State Department documents also 
reveal more than $716,346 USD in funding via 
Freedom House in 2008, for an 18-month project 
seeking to ?strengthen independent media in 
Venezuela?. This project also funded the creation 
of a ?resource center for journalists? in an 
unnamed Venezuelan university. ?The center will 
develop a community radio, website and training 
workshops?, all funded by the State Department.

Another $706,998 USD was channeled through PADF 
to ?promote freedom of expression in Venezuela? 
through a two-year project focusing on ?new media 
technologies and investigative journalism?. 
?Specifically, PADF and its local partner will 
provide training and follow-up support in 
innovative media technologies and formats in 
several regions throughout Venezuela
This 
training will be compiled and developed into a university-level curriculum?.

Another document evidences three Venezuelan 
universities, Universidad Central de Venezuela 
(Central University of Venezuela ?UCV?), 
Universidad Metropolitana (Metropolitan 
University) and Universidad Santa Maria (St. 
Mary?s University), which incorporated courses on 
media studies into their curriculums, designed 
and funded by the State Department. These three 
universities have been the principal launching 
pad for the anti-Chavez student movements during the past three years.

PADF also received $545,804 USD for a program 
titled ?Venezuela: The Voices of the Future?. 
This project, which allegedly lasted one year, 
was devoted to ?developing a new generation of 
independent journalists through a focus on new 
media technologies?. PADF also funded various 
blogs, newspapers, radio stations and television 
stations in regions throughout Venezuela, to 
ensure the ?publication? of reports and articles 
by the ?participants? in the program.

USAID and PADF

More funds have been distributed to anti-Chavez 
political groups in Venezuela through USAID?s 
Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI) in 
Caracas, which has an annual budget between $5-7 
million USD. These millions form part of the more 
than $40 million USD given annually to opposition 
organizations in Venezuela by US, European and 
Canadian agencies, as evidenced in the May 2010 
report, ?Venezuela: Assessing Democracy 
Assistance? published by the National Edowment 
for Democracy?s World Movement for Democracy 
(WMD) and Spain?s FRIDE Institute.

PADF has been active in Venezuela since 2005 as 
one of USAID?s principal contractors. PADF was 
created by the State Department in 1962 and is 
?affiliated? with the Organization of American 
States (OAS). In Venezuela, PADF has been working 
to ?strengthen local civil society groups?, and 
is ?one of few major international groups that 
have been able to provide significant cash grants 
and technical assistance to Venezuelan NGOs?.

Posted by Eva Golinger at 
<http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/07/documents-reveal-multimillion-dollar.html>12:53 
AM




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 16 20:06:59 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:06:59 -0700
Subject: [News] Effort to Shut Down Gulf Well is Failing
Message-ID: <mailman.170.1279325268.26853.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Published on This Can't Be Happening 
(<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net>http://www.thiscantbehappening.net)


----------


Breaking News: Effort to Shut Down Gulf Well is Failing

Created 07/16/2010 - 17:48
Dave Lindorff

The Coast Guard is conceding this afternoon that the pressure is not 
building up as hoped in the blown-out BP Deepwater Horizon well in 
the Gulf of Mexico, raising concerns that the pipe that runs from the 
surface down through the bore to the oil reservoir 13,000 feet below 
the sea bottom has lost its integrity, and is allowing oil under high 
pressure to leak out into the surrounding concrete and rock outside 
the pipe, where it can and likely will make its way to the waters above.

There is visual evidence that this is happening. While it has not 
been mentioned in news reports, one view taken of the sea floor taken 
by a 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/html/Hos_ROV1.html%E2%80%9D>videocam 
[1] on the Hos ROV 1, one of the remote robot submersibles monitoring 
the wellhead, and on display on the BP website, beginning at about 
2:48:40 Central Time showed clouds of muddy looking water suddenly 
spring up and begin obscuring the view of the sea floor. Some of the 
billowing material was light colored, and could be mud pushed up by 
leaking methane gas. Some looked decidedly dark brown, like the oil 
that has been seen coming from the top of the blowout preventer (BOP).

A second rover, the Viking Poseidon ROV 1, which was not included in 
the live cams displayed from BP's public access site, but which can 
be seen live 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/html/Viking_Poseidon_ROV1.html%E2%80%9D>here 
[2], also showed a large cloud of churning brown material billowing 
up from the sea floor beginning at 3:06:00 Central Time.

If either of these video images are in fact oil coming out of the 
ground around the wellhead, it would mean that the liner has been 
seriously breached somewhere below ground, and that there is no way 
to either stop the oil flow, or even collect it all from above the 
wellhead. That would certainly explain why the pressure at the 
stoppered wellhead has leveled off at about 6700 psi. That's well 
below the "80000-900 psi" that until today was what the government 
and BP said would be full pressure, and is even below the new, 
improved target mentioned by retired Adm. Thad Allen, who now says a 
more modest 7500 psi would be okay.

The only hope of stopping this catastrophe would be the relief wells 
that have been drilled to within a few feet of the casing, several 
miles down below the surface of the earth.

The failure of the effort to cap the well above the BOP, as I 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/139>wrote earlier [3], was 
pretty well foreordained when the same Viking Poseidon ROV 1, a month 
ago, showed a 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2RxIQP0IBU%E2%80%9D>video 
of oil blasting out of cracks in the sea floor [4] around the BOP, 
already proving that the casing had been breached.

It is possible that the pressure in the pipe was greater at that 
point, back on June 13, because the well opening, at the top of the 
BOP, was still crimped and holding back the gusher. Once that opening 
was cleared in preparation for installing the current cap, the oil 
was able to flow out more freely, which would have reduced the 
pressure on whatever leaks exist in the casing below ground.

But now, for reasons that still elude me, the government has allowed 
BP to try to shut down the well at the top, allowing the pressure in 
the whole casing to rise precipitously, and it appears the inevitable 
has happened: the oil and gas is pushing out the breaches in the 
casing, and is likely expanding the openings, too, making the breach 
worse than before.

The top of this blown out well should be opened up wide as soon as 
possible, and BP and the government should focus all efforts on those 
relief wells, and on trying to get this runaway well sealed at the 
bottom as soon as possible.

Trying to shut things off at the top was a fool's errand, and can 
only have been driven by a BP and White House PR effort to show that 
something is being done. However, some things shouldn't be done, and 
this is one of those things. The idea that the government and BP knew 
that shutting down the top of the well could lead to disaster, and 
that they went ahead and did it, knowing that it would only provide 
temporary relief at best anyhow, is insanity.

By the way, yesterday, I contacted both the BP and the government-run 
Unified Command press offices asking for an explanation as to how 
they could shut down the top of the well, when BP's own cameras in 
June showed oil blowing out of cracks in the sea floor near the 
wellhead. Both offices promised to respond. To date, neither has.

----------
Source URL: 
<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/140>http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/140

Links:
[1] 
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/html/Hos_ROV1.html"
[2] 
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/html/Viking_Poseidon_ROV1.html"
[3] http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/139
[4] http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2RxIQP0IBU"




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 20 11:04:31 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:04:31 -0700
Subject: [News] CIA Told that Iran Has No Nuclear Bomb Programme
Message-ID: <mailman.19.1279638803.5741.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Amiri Told CIA Iran Has No Nuclear Bomb Programme
Analysis by Gareth Porter

http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=3201
WASHINGTON, 19 Jul (IPS) - Contrary to a news media narrative that 
Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri has provided intelligence on covert 
Iranian nuclear weapons work, CIA sources familiar with the Amiri 
case say he told his CIA handlers that there is no such Iranian 
nuclear weapons programme, according to a former CIA officer.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official, told IPS that 
his sources are CIA officials with direct knowledge of the entire 
Amiri operation.

The CIA contacts say that Amiri had been reporting to the CIA for 
some time before being brought to the U.S. during Hajj last year, 
Giraldi told IPS, initially using satellite-based communication. But 
the contacts also say Amiri was a radiation safety specialist who was 
"absolutely peripheral" to Iran's nuclear programme, according to Giraldi.

Amiri provided "almost no information" about Iran's nuclear 
programme, said Giraldi, but had picked up "scuttlebutt" from other 
nuclear scientists with whom he was acquainted that the Iranians have 
no active nuclear weapon programme.

Giraldi said information from Amiri's debriefings was only a minor 
contribution to the intelligence community's reaffirmation in the 
latest assessment of Iran's nuclear programme of the 2007 National 
Intelligence Estimate (NIE)'s finding that work on a nuclear weapon 
has not been resumed after being halted in 2003.

Amiri's confirmation is cited in one or more footnotes to the new 
intelligence assessment of Iran's nuclear programme, called a 
"Memorandum to Holders", according to Giraldi, but it is now being 
reviewed, in light of Amiri's "re- defection" to Iran.

An intelligence source who has read the "Memorandum to Holders" in 
draft form confirmed to IPS that it presents no clear-cut departure 
from the 2007 NIE on the question of weaponisation. The developments 
in the Iranian nuclear programme since the 2007 judgment are 
portrayed as "subtle and complex", said the source.

CIA officials are doing their best to "burn" Amiri by characterising 
him as a valuable long-term intelligence asset, according to Giraldi, 
in part in order to sow as much distrust of him among Iranian 
intelligence officials as possible.

But Giraldi said it is "largely a defence mechanism" to ward off 
criticism of the agency for its handling of the Amiri case.

"The fact is he wasn't well vetted," said Giraldi, adding that Amiri 
was a "walk- in" about whom virtually nothing was known except his job.

Although an investigation has begun within the CIA of the procedures 
used in the case, Giraldi said, Amiri's erstwhile CIA handlers still 
do not believe he was a double agent or "dangle".

What convinced CIA officers of Amiri's sincerity, according to 
Giraldi, was Amiri's admission that he had no direct knowledge of the 
Iranian nuclear programme.

A "dangle" would normally be prepared with some important 
intelligence that the U.S. is known to value.

Amiri's extremely marginal status in relation to the Iranian nuclear 
programme was acknowledged by an unnamed U.S. official who told The 
New York Times and Associated Press Friday that Amiri was indeed a 
"low-level scientist", but that the CIA had hoped to use him to get 
to more highly placed Iranian officials.

Giraldi's revelations about Amiri's reporting debunks a media 
narrative in which Amiri provided some of the key evidence for a 
reversal by the intelligence community of its 2007 conclusion that 
Iran had not resumed work on nuclear weapons.

An Apr. 25 story by Washington Post reporters Joby Warrick and Greg 
Miller said the long-awaited reassessment of the Iranian nuclear 
programme had been delayed in order to incorporate a "new flow of 
intelligence" coming from "informants, including scientists with 
access to Iran's military programs&."

They quote Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair as 
explaining in an interview that the delay was because of "information 
coming in and the pace of developments".

Warrick and Miller reported that Amiri had "provided spy agencies 
with details about sensitive programs including a long-hidden 
uranium-enrichment plant near the city of Qom." Their sources were 
said to be "current and former officials in the United States and Europe".

Warrick and Miller could not get CIA officials to discuss Amiri. 
Instead they quoted the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI) 
as saying that Amiri "has been associated with sensitive nuclear 
programs for at least a decade".

NCRI is the political arm of Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), the 
anti-regime Iranian terrorist organization which has been a conduit 
for Israeli intelligence on the Iranian nuclear programme.

On Jun. 8, David E. Sanger of the New York Times cited "foreign 
diplomats and some American officials" as sources in reporting that a 
series of intelligence briefings for members of the U.N. Security 
Council last spring amounted to "a tacit admission by the United 
States that it is gradually backing away" from the 2007 NIE. Sanger 
referred to "new evidence" that allegedly led analysts to "revise and 
in some cases reverse" that estimate's conclusion that Iran was no 
longer working on a nuclear weapon.

Sanger cited "Western officials" as confirming that Amiri was 
providing some of the new information.

Three days later, the Washington Post ran another story quoting David 
Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International 
Security, as saying that the intelligence briefings for Security 
Council members had included "information about nuclear 
weaponisation" obtained from Amiri.

Albright said he had been briefed on the intelligence earlier that 
week, and the Post reported a "U.S. official" had confirmed Albright's account.

Subsequently, ABC News reported that Amiri's evidence had "helped to 
contradict" the 2007 NIE, and McClatchy Newspapers repeated 
Albright's allegation and the conclusion that the new assessment had 
reversed the intelligence conclusion that Iran had ceased work 
related to weaponisation.

In creating that false narrative, journalists have evidently been 
guided by personal convictions on the issue that are aligned with 
certain U.S., European and Israeli officials who have been pressuring 
the Barack Obama administration to reject the 2007 estimate.

For the Israelis and for some U.S. officials, reversing the 
conclusion that Iran is not actively pursuing weaponisation is 
considered a precondition for manoeuvring U.S. policy into a military 
confrontation with Iran.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist 
specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition 
of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the 
Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 21 12:43:08 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:43:08 -0700
Subject: [News] Israeli military destroys Palestinian village
Message-ID: <mailman.3.1279730673.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Israeli military destroys Palestinian village

author

  Wednesday July 21, 2010 17:22
author
 by Brian Ennis - IMEMC & Agencies 
<http://www.imemc.org/report_posts?subject=Report%20post:%20Story%2059169%20with%20title:%20Israeli%20military%20destroys%20Palestinian%20village&message=Report%20post:%20Story%2059169%20with%20title:%20Israeli%20military%20destroys%20Palestinian%20village%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.imemc.org%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D59169%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content>
Report post

http://www.imemc.org/article/59169

The Israeli military demolished an entire village in the Jordan 
Valley after declaring it within a closed military zone.

The Israeli occupation force destroyed an entire village Monday 
morning in the Jordan valley after most residents had left when the 
Civil Administration cut off the last of their water, according to Haaretz.

55 structures were destroyed by the Israeli military in Farasiya, 
leaving the 120 farmers, laborers and their families without homes.

The Israelis say they posted eviction notices declaring the area a 
live fire zone but received no appeals challenging the declaration.

The residents were mostly shepherds and those that worked the land of 
families in the nearby town of Tubas.

This is the culmination of a number of policies by Israel to choke 
the people of water and ultimately into leaving the land. A few years 
ago the army destroyed a pipe the residents had laid to bring water 
from a nearby stream into their farms and for drinking.

Last year they forbid the residents from connecting to wells made by 
Mekorot Water Company. They have since been pumping saltwater to the 
surface for their livestock and having water brought in by tanker, 
until four months ago when the Civil Administration confiscated the pumps.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Thu Jul 22 16:38:18 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:38:18 -0700
Subject: [News] Venezuela cuts ties with Colombia
Message-ID: <mailman.7.1279831120.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Thursday, July 22, 2010

23:30 Mecca time, 20:30 GMT

Venezuela cuts ties with Colombia

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/07/2010722153742742163.html

Venezuela has broken off diplomatic relations with Colombia after 
Bogota charged that leftist guerrilla leaders it is fighting are in 
Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has said.

"I announce with a tear in the heart: Venezuela breaks off from this 
moment all relations with the government of Colombia," Chavez told 
journalists at the presidential palace on Thursday.

"We have no other choice but, out of dignity, to totally break our 
relations with our brother nation of Colombia," the president said 
live on state television, as he hosted a visit by Argentine soccer 
star Diego Maradona.

Nicolas Maduro,Venezuela's foreign minister, declared immediately 
afterwards that Colombia had 72 hours to withdraw its diplomats in 
Venezuela and close its embassy.

Earlier, Colombia's foreign ministry had said that Maria Luisa 
Chiappe, its ambassador to Caracas, Venezuela's capital, would be 
called back to Bogota "to evaluate the situation".

At an emergency meeting of the Washington-based Organisation of 
American States (OAS), Luis Alfonso Hoyos, a Colombian diplomat, 
presented evidence that he said suggests Venezuela was harbouring 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) rebels.

Killings and kidnappings

Hoyos accused Chavez's government of tolerating the rebels who he 
said carried out killings, kidnappings and drug-trafficking on both 
sides of the long frontier.

"The continent cannot allow this nightmare to spread," Hoyos said.

But Roy Chaderton, Venezuela's ambassador, rejected the Colombian 
presentation as a "lie", saying: "There is no evidence, no proof, 
these are photos taken I don't know where."

Hoyos went on to show a series of photos and videos of alleged Farc 
leaders and guerrillas relaxing, roasting pigs and playing a piano at 
camps he said were well inside Venezuela.

"Given the past history on this issue, the most likely outcome is 
going to be stonewalling, postponement, setting up a committee to 
investigate the matter,"

Larry Burns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington

"Facts over recent weeks show that real risks are materialising due 
to the consolidated, active and growing presence of these terrorist 
groups in Venezuela," Hoyos said.

He added that the Venezuelan authorities "tolerate the presence of 
these groups, they don't carry out actions against them".

Sometimes the rebels are even accompanied by members of Venezuela's 
National Guard, Hoyos added.

Farc rebels carried out cross-border attacks from Venezuela as 
recently as June and July, Hoyos said as he showed photographs of 
civilian and military victims of these attacks.

The ambassador's remarks came a week after Alvaro Uribe, Colombia's 
outgoing president who leaves office in August, said his government 
had evidence that five leaders of leftist guerrilla groups were in Venezuela.

Uribe's office is contending the rebel leaders in Venezuela include 
four senior members of Farc and one from the smaller National 
Liberation Army (ELN).

Both rebel movements have been waging an armed campaign against the 
Colombian government since the mid-1960s.

Larry Burns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in 
Washington, told Al Jazeera that "some people believe [Alvaro] Uribe 
wants to shape the future of Colombia's foreign policy and maintain a 
policy of hositility towards Venezuela".

Uribe accusations

"Uribe is the one who disclosed and made the accusation that 
Venezuelans have taken in Farc guerrillas and have provided them with 
hospitality. The incoming president [Juan Manuel Santos] hasn't made 
those charges," he said.

Burns added that it was "unlikely" that the OAS would take any 
decisive action on the matter.

"There are a number of countries in the OAS who are very favourable 
to Hugo Chavez and that includes Argentina, which is a very important 
country in Latin America," he said.

"Given the past history on this issue, the most likely outcome is 
going to be stonewalling, postponement, setting up a committee to 
investigate the matter, but there's going to be an effort to shun any 
clear confrontation because of the fact that the evidence is 
questionable and the motivation is even more questionable."

Colombia and Venezuela cut diplomatic ties last year after Bogota and 
the US signed a military co-operation agreement that Chavez 
considered a threat to regional security.

Chavez has accused Uribe of trying to thwart a normalisation of 
relations when the Colombian leader leaves office August 7.

Uribe, who has had tense relations with his Venezuelan counterpart, 
will be succeeded by Juan Manuel Santos, his former defence minister, 
who has signalled a less hostile approach to Venezuela.
  Source: Al Jazeera and agencies




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 23 11:06:45 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 08:06:45 -0700
Subject: [News] The utility of Cuban prisoners
Message-ID: <mailman.31.1279897634.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

The utility of Cuban prisoners

Posted: 22 Jul 2010 07:46 AM PDT
http://machetera.wordpress.com/

For whom are the [Cuban] prisoners useful? - 
<http://la-isla-desconocida.blogspot.com/2010/07/para-quienes-son-utiles-los-presos.html>espa?ol

Enrique Ubieta G?mez

Translation: Machetera

So here?s the problem.  The ex-prisoners arrive 
in Madrid.  The press clings to them for a few 
days.  If they?re lucky, they?ll begin to live 
from their labors and not from subversive 
activity that was quite well paid.  Perhaps some 
will manage a post in cyberspace.  But, as the 
Cubans say, no es f?cil [it's not easy], in the 
midst of an economic crisis.  I have no idea how 
much they?ll be paid for their commentary (the 
offensive or threatening diatribes they launch at 
revolutionary bloggers), but if we don?t publish 
them, they don?t get paid.  Little by little, 
they?ll be forgotten.  They?re no longer any 
use.  In other words, they?re no longer any use 
for their former promoters, for U.S. imperialism.

The math is simple.  A counter-revolutionary in 
the streets of Havana is worth something, just 
not a lot.  They don?t inspire anyone.  Those who 
pay them prefer that they end up in prison or on 
hunger strikes.  Preferably moribund, or 
dead.  How many tales of kidnappings and 
15-minute public beatings without eyewitnesses or 
physical traces has Yoani had to invent for 
herself in order to feed the chronic lack of 
spectacle or heroism suffered by her cyberspace 
?dissidence??  Over what argument will the next 
media campaign be launched?  Fari?as will need to 
take a vacation before launching his, I don?t 
know, 25th or 26th hunger strike.  And he?ll have 
to keep a good excuse at hand.  But the Ladies in 
White have been left with nothing.  Without a 
social goal, in bureaucracy-speak.

In the midst of the extreme triumphal excitement 
surrounding the prisoner release one can begin to 
see the first signs of unease.  The demands of 
the multinational mainstream press and 
politicians in the metropolitan centers were 
dressed in humanitarian garb, but the objective 
was not the liberation of the mercenaries, but ? 
through blackmail ? avoiding their release.  What 
was desired ? what is desired ? is the toppling 
of the Cuban Revolution.  And one mercenary in 
prison is worth more than five in the street and 
ten in Spain.  Now they say nothing has 
happened.  According to EFE, Ra?l Rivero, whose 
poetic pen is compensated by the networks of the 
U.S.-Hispanic rightwing (I?m talking about the 
rightwing Spanish PP [Popular Party] ? not the 
rightwing PSOE [Spanish Socialist Workers Party]) 
insists that the freeing of the prisoners is ?a 
unilateral decision? by the Cuban government that 
has not been influenced by conversations with the 
Spanish government and the Catholic church; it?s 
some kind of trick.  The PP is trying to keep the 
media show going as long as possible for the 
ex-prisoners on Spanish soil, through anti-PSOE skirmishes.

The Cuban Revolution knows how to converse, on 
any subject, equal to equal.  If Obama?s 
government should care to do so, it would find no 
obstacles.  However, the subversive escalation 
has not diminished.  On June 18th, USAID tendered 
$3,650,000 to finance subversive programs and 
networks in Cuba: $500,000 for those it calls 
?political prisoners? and their families; 
$1,500,000 to open spaces for ?freedom of 
expression? (U.S. style, in Cuba); $500,000 to 
create or strengthen religious and spiritual 
groups aligned with Washington; $500,000 to 
promote private unions; etc.  This money comes on 
top of the $15 million dollars recently unfrozen 
for USAID?s Cuba program.  Is receiving money 
from a foreign government with the explicit 
proposal of subverting order within the country 
itself not an execrable and punishable act?  U.S. 
and European laws carry heavy sentences for those 
engaging in this crime.  No-one questions 
them.  Who would call them ?political prisoners? or ?prisoners of conscience??

If the Cuban Revolution does not fall apart, 
nothing has changed.  And the old mercenaries are 
now useless.  They?re just another bunch of 
hungry mouths in Madrid.  New ones will need to 
be found, to substitute.  And of course they?ll 
be found.  And they?ll be arrested and judged, 
just like in any city throughout the 
world.  They?ll be the new media ?heroes,? 
shooting stars in the firmament of imperial 
war.  The Ladies in White, new ones of course, 
and perhaps some of the old ones signing on ?in 
support? for nostalgia?s sake, will march with 
their gladiolas in front of CNN?s or TVE?s 
cameras.  The circus will begin again.  The 
prisoners are useful for the empire, only for the 
empire, but Cuba will not tolerate 
impunity.  Once again, the Cuban Revolution has 
made a gesture of the highest kind of policy, 
that of humanism; but apparently Obama doesn?t 
have the political courage ? the balls ? to free 
the five Cuban political prisoners, those who did 
fight to prevent death on both sides of the sea.

Enrique Ubieta G?mez is a Cuban journalist; 
editor of 
<http://la-isla-desconocida.blogspot.com/>La Isla 
Desconocida blog and managing director of the 
Cuban publication La Calle del Medio.  Machetera 
is a member of <http://www.tlaxcala.es/>Tlaxcala, 
the network of translators for linguistic 
diversity. This translation may be reprinted as 
long as the content remains unaltered, and the 
source, author, and translator are cited.



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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 23 12:42:31 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:42:31 -0700
Subject: [News] Israel's Fingerprints Surface on The Hariri Assassination
Message-ID: <mailman.34.1279903369.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

http://www.counterpunch.org/

July 23 - 25, 2010


Israel's Fingerprints Surface

The Hariri Assassination

By RANNIE AMIRI

In the Middle East, the link between political 
machinations, espionage and assassination is 
either clear as day, or clear as mud.

As for the yet unsolved case of the February 2005 
murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, 
mud might be giving way to daylight.

A crackdown on Israeli spy rings operating in 
Lebanon has resulted in more than 70 arrests over 
the past 18 months. Included among them are four 
high-ranking Lebanese Army and General Security 
officers?one having spied for the Mossad since 1984.

A significant breakthrough in the ongoing 
investigation occurred in late June and 
culminated in the arrest of Charbel Qazzi, head 
of transmission and broadcasting at Alfa, one of 
Lebanon?s two state-owned mobile service providers.

According to the Lebanese daily As-Safir, Qazzi 
confessed to installing computer programs and 
planting electronic chips in Alfa transmitters. 
These could then be used by Israeli intelligence 
to monitor communications, locate and target 
individuals for assassination, and potentially 
deploy viruses capable of erasing recorded 
information in the contact lines. Qazzi?s 
collaboration with Israel reportedly dates back 14 years.

On July 12, a second arrest at Alfa was made. 
Tarek al-Raba?a, an engineer and partner of 
Qazzi, was apprehended on charges of spying for 
Israel and compromising national security. A few 
days later, a third Alfa employee was similarly detained.

Israel has refused to comment on the arrests. 
Nevertheless, their apparent ability to have 
penetrated Lebanon?s military and 
telecommunication sectors has rattled the country 
and urgently raised security concerns.

What does any of this have to do with the Hariri assassination?

Outside the obvious deleterious ramifications of 
high-ranking Lebanese military officers working 
for Israel, the very legitimacy of the Special 
Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is now in question. 
The STL is the U.N.-sanctioned body tasked with 
prosecuting those responsible for the 
assassination of the late prime minister. On Feb. 
14, 2005, 1,000 kg of explosives detonated near 
Hariri?s passing motorcade, killing him and 21 others.

It is believed the STL will issue indictments in 
the matter as early as September?relying heavily 
on phone recordings and mobile transmissions to do so.

According to the 
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100716/wl_mideast_afp/lebanonisraelspytelecomhezbollah>AFP, 
?A preliminary report by the U.N. investigating 
team said it had collected data from mobile phone 
calls made the day of Hariri's murder as evidence.?

<http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100718/FOREIGN/707179831/1002>The 
National likewise reported, ?The international 
inquiry, which could present indictments or 
findings as soon as September, according to 
unverified media reports, used extensive phone 
records to draw conclusions into a conspiracy to 
kill Hariri, widely blamed on Syria and its Lebanese allies ...?

In a July 16 televised speech, Hezbollah 
Secretary-General Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah 
speculated the STL would use information gleaned 
from Israeli-compromised communications to 
falsely implicate the group in the prime minister?s murder:

?Some are counting in their analysis of the (STL) 
indictment on witnesses, some of whom turned out 
to be fake, and on the telecommunications 
networks which were infiltrated by spies who can change and manipulate data.

?Before the (2006) war, these spies gave 
important information to the Israeli enemy and 
based on this information, Israel bombed 
buildings, homes, factories and institutions. 
Many martyrs died and many others were wounded. 
These spies are partners in the killings, the 
crimes, the threats and the displacement.?

Nasrallah called the STL?s manipulation an 
?Israeli project? meant to ?create an uproar in Lebanon.?

Indeed, in May 2008 Lebanon experienced a taste 
of this. At the height of an 18-month stalemate 
over the formation of a national unity government 
under then Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, his 
cabinet?s decision to unilaterally declare 
Hezbollah?s fixed-line communication system 
illegal pushed the country to the 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/amiri05102008.html>brink of civil war.

Recognizing the value their secure lines of 
communication had in combating the July 2006 
Israeli invasion and suspecting that state-owned 
telecoms might be compromised, Hezbollah resisted 
Siniora?s plans to have its network dismantled. 
Their men swept through West Beirut and put a 
quick end to the government?s plan. Two years 
later, their suspicions appear to have been vindicated.

Opposition MP and Free Patriotic Movement head 
Michel Aoun has already 
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2010-07/17/c_13402375.htm>warned 
Nasrallah that the STL will likely indict 
?uncontrolled? Hezbollah members to be followed 
by ?
 Lebanese-Lebanese and Lebanese-Palestinian 
tension, and by an Israeli war on Lebanon.?

Giving credence to Nasrallah and Aoun?s 
assertions, Commander in Chief of the Israel 
Defense Forces Gabi Ashkenazi, 
<http://www.politicaltheatrics.net/2010/07/%E2%80%9Cmerlin%E2%80%9D-ashkenazi-wishfully-predicts-deterioration-in-lebanon-in-september/>predicted 
?with lots of wishes? that the situation in 
Lebanon would deteriorate in September after the 
STL indicts Hezbollah for Hariri?s assassination.

Ashkenazi?s gleeful, prescient testimony to the 
Knesset?s Foreign Affairs Committee betrays what 
Israel hopes the fallout from the STL?s report 
will be: fomentation of civil strife and discord 
among Lebanon?s sectarian groups, generally 
divided into pro- and anti-Syria factions. 
Ashkenazi anticipates this to happen, of course, 
because he knows Israel?s unfettered access to 
critical phone records will have framed Hezbollah for the crime.

Israel?s agents and operatives in Lebanon and its 
infiltration of a telecom network have been 
exposed. At the very least, the STL must 
recognize that evidence of alleged Hezbollah 
involvement in Hariri?s death (a group that 
historically enjoyed good ties with the late 
premier) is wholly tainted and likely doctored.

The arrest of Qazzi and al-Raba?a in the breakup 
of Israeli spy rings should prompt the STL to 
shift its focus to the only regional player that 
has benefited from Hariri?s murder; one that will 
continue to do so if and when their designs to 
implicate Hezbollah are realized.

It is time to look at Tel Aviv.

Rannie Amiri is an independent Middle East 
commentator. He may be reached at: rbamiri [at] yahoo [dot] com.




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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 23 12:59:43 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:59:43 -0700
Subject: [News] Cuba's Prisoner Release
Message-ID: <mailman.37.1279904402.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

[and some of the obvious omissions are the 
political prisoners being held in u.s. prisons - 
some for over 40 years - victims of Cointelpro, 
others being given 20-year sentences more 
recently for property damage - or like the Cuban 
Five, getting enormous sentences for exposing 
u.s. sponsored attacks against Cuba]

July 23 - 25, 2010


Surprise! Mainstream Media Omits Context and Key Facts

Cuba's Prisoner Release

By SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES

On July 8, the Washington Post lead story ["Cuba 
to release 52 political prisoners, Catholic 
Church says"] reported Cuba had released five 
political prisoners with assurances of 
forty-seven more to come in the near future. 
Cuban President Raul Castro said all political 
prisoners would soon be released. On July 16, another group was freed.

The Post story and its July 9 editorial "Cuba's 
marginal gesture" omitted facts readers would 
need in order to understand the significance of 
the prisoner release. Both pieces convey the 
image of a "political prisoner" who is dedicated 
to expressing unwelcome views - perhaps a poet, 
or a whistle blower who has uncovered corruption. 
But these prisoners were in jail for committing 
crimes that would have placed them behind bars if 
they were done in the United States including 
working for a foreign government without registering, and committing violence.

For example, Orlando Zapata the hunger striker 
who died in March was convicted of aggravated, 
assault -- cutting off a man's ear with a machete 
because the man had intervened to stop a street 
brawl. He developed his reputation as a 
"dissident" while serving his sentence in prison.

When James Cason arrived in Cuba in 2003 to head 
the US diplomatic mission the State Department 
reportedly instructed him to adopt the "ugly 
American" role, to interfere blatantly in Cuba's 
domestic affairs. Roger Noriega, then Assistant 
Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere 
Affairs, recently explained on a Miami radio talk 
show that the motive was to induce Cuba to expel 
him, thus providing the Bush Administration with 
a pretext to end formal contacts with the island. 
To achieve that goal, Cason openly organized and 
paid Cuban "dissidents." Rather than expel the 
puppeteer, however, Cuba arrested the puppets 
Cason had used as human instruments for his 
machinations. (July 1, Que Pasa, Miami, referring 
to May 20 interview on WQBA Miami [Univision], "Lo que otros no dicen")

The editorial also missed the fact that the 
United States holds more political prisoners in 
Cuba (Guantanamo Base) [and in US prisons] than 
the Cuban government does . Of the 181 remaining 
Guantanamo detainees, an Obama Task Force 
recommended 48 should be released since they have 
been cleared of criminal acts. Most of these 
people were kidnapped. No warrants were issued 
for their arrests (July 9, Financial Times).

The US government justified such ?arrests? post 
9/11 because Americans felt under attack from 
terrorists. We should thus be able to empathize 
with Cubans who at least issued arrest warrants 
for people who secretly received money from 
Cuba's avowed enemy. Declassified CIA documents 
attest to thousands of CIA-backed-terrorist raids 
against Cuba since the early 1960s. More Cubans 
died in these attacks than perished in the 9/11 
horrors. Cuba also suffered substantial property 
damage from CIA backed sabotage of factories and fields.

As for civil liberties, Cuba at least held formal 
trials for the dissidents and found them guilty 
of organizing at the behest of US officials as 
well as discussing future actions and accepting 
money, goods or services from US diplomats.  They 
were not charged for having opposing ideas -- 
although the expression of opposition ideas may 
have motivated the arrests. The Post editorial, 
like a similar sermon in the Los Angeles Times 
(July 10), seems to have made its judgment by using a double standard.

The US media has also portrayed Ghandi-like 
attributes of Guillermo Fari?as, the other faster 
of conscience, which might have been tempered by 
the fact of his 1995 arrest for beating the 
female director of a hospital. In 2002, he 
attacked another woman who then needed surgery.

Zapata and Fari?as may qualify as legitimate 
political oppositionists, but would the editorial 
have talked of George Jackson and other former 
Black Panthers without mentioning their criminal records?

Nowhere do the double standards applied to Cuba 
shine more dramatically than in the issue of 
terrorism. Currently, the United States harbors 
individuals accused of horrific terrorist acts - 
sabotage of a Cuban commercial airliner killing 
73 and a spate of bombings of Cuban tourist spots 
killing an Italian and wounding many. Instead of 
indicting or extraditing Luis Posada Carriles and 
Orlando Bosch for international terrorism -- CIA 
and FBI cables point to their role in sabotaging 
the airliner over Barbados in 1976 killing all 
aboard ? Washington has protected them. The 
Justice Department has charged Posada with 
immigration fraud, a minor charge, and has 
allowed the case to drag on for six years.

Double standards and irony abound. Spain and the 
United States lecture Cuba on freedom after 
holding the island as a formal and informal 
economic colony respectively for 450 years. 
Somehow, both seem to claim they have a perennial 
right to dictate Cuban government behavior.

Saul Landau, a fellow of the Institute for Policy 
Studies is author of 
<http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html>A 
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD, published by CounterPunch.

Nelson P Valdes, Professor Emeritus, Sociology Department, University of
New Mexico.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 23 18:48:23 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:48:23 -0700
Subject: [News] Women prepared to break the siege of Gaza
Message-ID: <mailman.55.1279925324.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Women prepared to break the siege of Gaza

Mona Alami, The Electronic Intifada, 23 July 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11417.shtml

BEIRUT (IPS) - The Maryam, an all-female Lebanese aid ship, currently 
docked in the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli, is getting ready to 
set sail for Gaza in the next few days. The ship, which aims to break 
Israel's siege on the Palestinian territory, will carry about fifty 
aid workers, including some US nuns keen to deliver aid to the 
long-suffering women and children of Gaza.

"We were all drawn to the project ... united by a feeling of stark 
injustice," says Samar Hajj, one of the organizers of the Maryam, 
which is named after the mother of Christ.

Israel's siege began in 2006 after Hamas won Palestinian legislative 
elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Its watertight blockade 
has been maintained with Egypt's help, since Hamas sought control of 
the territory in 2007. It has resulted in crippling shortages, making 
daily life difficult in Gaza.

On 31 May, Israeli forces attacked Mavi Marmara, a Turkish 
humanitarian aid vessel bringing aid to Gaza, killing nine Turkish 
activists -- one a US citizen -- on board. After the attack, which 
sparked a wave of global condemnation of Israel, Hajj gathered to 
protest against Israel in downtown Beirut with 11 other friends. "We 
were appalled at the violent images we saw on TV and wanted to take action."

The women later got in touch with Yasser Kashlak, a 36-year-old 
Syrian of Palestinian origin, who heads the Free Palestine Movement. 
Kashlak had contributed to the financing of other vessels that tried 
breaking the siege, including the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the Naji al Ali.

"After the Mavi Marmara incident, one of the women hailed Mary during 
our weekly meeting. Her exclamation came like a revelation, so we 
decided to call our ship Maryam [Mary in Arabic]. The name was 
perfect for a vessel that comprised only women. Who could disparage 
the Virgin Mary, a recognized saint in most religions?" says Hajj.

The ship is slated to make a stopover in a friendly port before 
heading to Gaza because of the palpable hostility between Lebanon and 
Israel. Last month, the Cypriot government banned any vessel headed 
to Gaza from its docks. But activists can still sail from a port in 
Turkish Cyprus.

"We have the option to sail from a number of friendly ports and are 
completely aware of our obligation to transit through a foreign port 
to avoid our trip being labeled an act of war," says Hajj.

Hajj estimates that she has received about 500 applications for the 
trip, but the Maryam will transport only about fifty women, half of 
who are Lebanese nationals, the rest being Arabs, Europeans and from 
the US. The organizer explains that carrying Palestinians on the ship 
is not an option because of the risk of arrests by Israelis.

"The ship will transport cancer medicine and other necessary items 
for women and children. We will not carry any weapons or terrorists, 
irrespective of what the Israeli army might say," says Hajj.

While they wait to set sail, the headquarters of the Maryam remains 
agog with activity as women from different backgrounds, political 
affiliations, nationalities and religious beliefs converse, argue and joke.

"All women traveling on the ship have taken on the name 'Maryam' and 
are distinguishable by a number, like 'Maryam 1,' 'Maryam 2,' etc. We 
prefer to keep identities secret to avoid pressure from respective 
embassies," adds Hajj.

"Maryam 1" is a middle aged Indian lawyer and the wife of an admiral. 
"I am a follower of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi who fought 
against every form of oppression peacefully in the course of his 
life. He was also opposed to the occupation of Palestine," she says.

The lawyer explains that before deciding to join the Maryam, she 
studied the legal implications of the attack on the Freedom Flotilla, 
which she says was illegitimate.

"What the Mavi Marmara attack highlighted was that two sets of rules 
were applied to humanity, depending on a people's color, race and 
religion. But what people fail to realize is that suffering is by 
nature indivisible."

Sitting across from her was "Maryam 2," a former biologist of 
Lebanese-Armenian descent. "I have been closely following the 
Palestinian issue and have been moved by the blatant injustice that 
is practiced against Palestinians by the Israelis," she says.

At the daily meetings, "Maryam 2" bonded with other women from 
diverse backgrounds, particularly a Turkish journalist. Turkey and 
Armenia have been at odds since the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 
the early 20th century.

"The journalist, who barely speaks English, told me I was a godsend 
when she discovered I could speak some Turkish. Here at the Maryam 
headquarters, nationality and religion dissolve behind the common 
resolve of breaking the siege of Gaza," she says.

The sail date for both aid ships from Beirut has yet to be announced. 
Lebanese Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi said the Naji al-Ali is now 
docked at the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli and can set sail once 
it is cleared by port authorities. However, the pan-Arab daily 
al-Hayat reported recently that the sail of the two ships has been 
postponed until further notice, particularly after Iran canceled 
sending two aid ships to the area. The report was denied by Saer 
Ghandour, the organizer of the Naji al-Ali sailing, who added that 
the ship's formalities were still in process.

Meanwhile, most Maryam passengers are impatient to set sail. "We will 
not fight Israelis with weapons, stones or knives, but with our free 
will," says "Maryam 3," a single woman working in the Lebanese 
government. "And we will not surrender."

In Israel, the army chief, Gabi Ashkenazi, told the Knesset's Foreign 
Affairs and Defense Committee on 6 July that every effort should be 
made to ensure that no more flotillas set sail for Gaza.

"Now a Lebanese flotilla with women and parliament members is getting 
organized. Israel is trying to prevent its departure in open and covert ways."



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Sat Jul 24 11:37:00 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:37:00 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Palestine_-_Interview_with_=93Atallah_Hanna?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?=94?=
Message-ID: <mailman.60.1279985844.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 06:08 PM PDT
http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2010/07/exclusive-intifada-interview-with-archbishop-theodosios-atallah-hanna/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+intifada-palestine%2FyTiY+%28Intifada+Palestine%29

Intifada Exclusive Interview with his Eminence

Archbishop Theodosios "Atallah Hanna"

Archbishop of Sebastia

Greek Orthodox Patriarchate Of Jerusalem

"For those who use the Bible to support Israel need to differentiate 
between God promise and Balfour promise, because the occupation is 
the result of a promise given to the Israelis by Lord Balfour and not 
by God." Archbishop Theodosios


Elias Harb: Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel has 
claimed in varies publications  that Jews, Christians and Muslims are 
able to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem and that only under 
Israeli sovereignty had freedom of worship for all religions been 
assured in the city. How do you respond to that?

Archbishop Theodosios: The facts on the ground say exactly the 
opposite, more and more Muslims and Christians are having great 
difficulties in entering the city. We see thousands are denied the 
entry to their holiest sites. The Israelis authorities are even 
preventing the Arab Jerusalemites from entering the Holy sepulcher 
and the Aqsa mosque on major religious feasts.  It is very apparent 
that the Israelis want Jerusalem to themselves and they do not want 
to share it with others. It is a pity that the city of peace, which 
must symbolize brotherhood and love to be transformed into symbol of 
hatred and division because of Israeli actions.

EH: How has the Israeli Occupation affected Palestinians living in 
the West Bank right to worship and visit the Holy Places in 
Jerusalem? What is the importance of Jerusalem to the Palestinians? 
Could be there a state for the Palestinians without Jerusalem as its 
capital? How Israel developments projects changed the features of the 
holy land?

AT: Let me be clear on this subject, there will be no Palestine 
without Jerusalem as its capital. It is ridicules to imagine 
Palestine without Jerusalem, because it beats in the heart of every 
Palestinian. In addition to that, Israel tries to change the features 
of Jerusalem through its development projects like the light train, 
the malls or the parks. They are trying to make Palestinians 
foreigners in their own city. According to international law, 
Jerusalem is still an occupied city, thus it has no right to change 
anything in it. Whatever is the final agreement between the Israelis 
and the Palestinians, the Palestinians should have the free right of 
entry to their city without any restrictions; also they must have the 
right to live in it, build their homes and resides in Jerusalem 
without the interference of anybody. The Palestinian in Jerusalem is 
in his city and his country and not a stranger and the treatment of 
the Palestinian as a outsider is by itself a racist action.

EH: Many people around the around are unaware of the dwindling 
Christian population in the Holy land. How critical is this situation 
and what will happen to the future of Christianity in the Holy Land?

AT: First of all, I should stress on the fact that the Palestinian 
Christians  were here since Jesus times, where in the Books of Acts 
in the Bible it was mentioned that there were Arabs listening to the 
Apostles in Jerusalem. Christians Arabs had and still have a big 
effect in the development of the Arab societies in the Middle east. 
We are not visitors or strangers to Palestine. Our history is deeply 
rooted in this area of the world. On the other hand, our numbers is 
dwindling due to the occupation and the bitter reality it is causing. 
But we are not afraid that Christians will disappear from Palestine, 
because there will be always Christians  in Palestine to continue the 
message of Jesus Christ.

EH: Many Evangelical Christians in U.S. and western countries believe 
that the emergence of the state of Israel is promised by God. They 
support Israel financially. What is the Orthodox Church position on 
this matter?

AT: The Orthodox church as all churches in the Holy land refuses to 
give excuses from the Bible for the unjust treatment of the Palestinian people.

I am very sorry to hear about some religious groups in the United 
States that support the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian 
territories. Such support cannot be justified from a Christian point 
of view because Christianity is against any sort of occupation and 
the injustice in it all forms and rationalization.

These groups need to re-read their Bible, because the Bible calls 
call us to stand with the marginalized and the oppressed and not with 
the oppressors.

For those who use the Bible to support Israel need to differentiate 
between God promise and Balfour promise, because the occupation is 
the result of a promise given to the Israelis by Lord Balfour and not by God.

God is innocent from the unjust actions of the Israeli occupation of 
our land since 1948 and until now.

EH: Israel has built the separation wall and claims it is for 
security purposes, how do you respond to that?  Also how has the 
Separation Wall affected the daily lives of 
Palestinians?       Israel has created many facts on the ground in 
the occupied territories; do you believe a two state solution to the 
Palestine/Israeli conflict is still possible?

AT: First of all, I want to stress on the fact that wall is illegal, 
even the highest court system in the world declared that it is 
illegal, thus our duty as humans have an obligation towards their 
brethren to dismantle this racist wall. The purpose of this wall is 
simply to cut Palestinians from their neighbors, family and land. A 
proof of that is the inhuman checkpoints, where if a person who wants 
to visit his/her relative in Jerusalem, is not allowed to enter, and 
if by some miracle he got a permission, he has to pass this awful 
checkpoints where is treated in a very humiliating way. I do not 
think security reasons have to do anything with it, especially that 
62% of the wall is done. It is just an excuse to take more land 
illegally and separate Palestinians from each other.

EH:  Israeli and the Western press is demanding that Hamas release 
Gilad Shalat, yet hardly anyone mention the thousands of Palestinians 
political prisoners? Can you tell briefly the situation of 
Palestinian political prisoners?

AT: There are about 11000 political prisoners in Israeli jails, 
quarter of the Palestinian people at some point or another were in 
prison since 1967. This is a big number. It is sad, that the 
international media does not bring it up to the light. These are 
people who fought for a just and right cause, and at the same time 
they are treated in the most inhuman ways a person can imagine.  The 
duty of every free person on the world who believes in the human 
rights, and who believes that all humans were born equal to stand beside them.

Not mentioning the biggest prison in the world is the Gaza strip. 
There are a million and a half living in Gaza. We pray and ask every 
free person in the world to work for the release of the people in Gaza.

EH: On May 31, Israeli commandos attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla 
killing 9 humanitarian activists, wounding over 50 .  Can you share 
your thoughts on this recent attack?

AT: It is a very sad incident that we will never forget. The 
brutality of the Israeli forces is expectable. Whenever people try to 
show the dark side of the Israeli occupation and situation in Gaza, 
they try to shut their voices down. Our condolences and thanks for 
the Turkish government and people who stood a very brave stand toward 
our people.

The flotilla which participated in it several people from different 
nationalities and religions conforming that there are still people 
who believes in the values of justice and peace.

EH:  For the past 62 years, Palestinian who were expelled from 
Palestine,  have been living in refugee Camps in Gaza, West Bank, 
Jordan, Lebanon, an Syria waiting for the right to return to their 
homeland. What message of hope, would you give to these refugee's.

AT: I say to all the Palestinian refugees they should still not give 
up their right of return. It is a right that could not be canceled by 
time. It is a human right because every Palestinian refugee should 
return to his/her home.

Do not lose hope because our cause is a just one and the person who 
was wronged in a way or another should not be desperate, but we 
should still claim our rights where we hope that one day and it will 
be soon Enshaala (God Willing) that every Palestinian could return to 
his/her home.

EH: Thank you Sayidna (Your Eminence) .



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 26 10:34:52 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:34:52 -0700
Subject: [News] Support Africa Today and Walter Turner!
Message-ID: <mailman.83.1280154915.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Just to add that Walter is one of the few people to also consistently 
support and air stories about u.s. political prisoners.
claude

A PERSONAL PLEA TO SUPPORT "AFRICA TODAY"

  Yesterday at 9:54pm

Hotep Africans,

I am forwarding you this urgent message below from our Brother Walter 
Turner regarding a proposed program change from the KPFA's acting 
General Manager which would in short end brother Walter's ability to 
host the much needed "Africa Today" program. This could mean the end 
of this program as we know and depend on it as a media source for 
both local, national, and international news on the African Continent 
and the African Diaspora. We must support this Brother by writing the 
KPFA folks below and letting them know that we don't support their 
idea of the time change.

I ask you all both locally and out of the area to please take a small 
bit of your time and let these people know how we feel about losing 
that space and particularly our media scribe Brother Walter's ability 
to host this program. Brother Walter does not get paid for his effort 
of hosting this program so we are not talking about someone's job. 
This is this Brothers service to African People. Let's show a strong 
unity in this small but large segment of our struggle for uplifting our people.

In Struggle,
Naeem Deskins


Africa Today/ KPFA/ Your support is needed

From: Walter Turner Host/ Producer/Africa Today / KPFA

I am contacting you as a supporter and or long time listener of the
Program "Africa Today" on KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California.

AFRICA TODAY has been aired in various formats on KPFA Radio for more 
than 30 years. The initial host of Africa Today was Faraha Hayati and 
I have now hosted the program for more than 20 years.

I have been informed by Amelia Gonzalez, the Acting Assisitant 
General Manager of KPFA that there is a proposal to change the time 
slot of Africa Today from 7PM on Monday evenings to 11AM during a 
weekday. This time change will effectively end my ability to produce 
and host Africa Today.

I have attached a letter to the Acting Assistant General Mangager 
which explains my specific concerns regarding the proposed change and 
the impact that it will on my ability to host and produce the program.

Africa Today on KPFA is one of a very few national media programs 
that focuses on the Africa continent. Africa Today is a resource that 
our global community can not afford to lose. Please voice your 
support and work with others to voice collective support for the 
retention of Africa Today, in its current time slot, on KPFA Radio.

Please voice your individual and collective concerns to the following 
members of the KPFA administrative staff at your earliest convenience.

Thank you

Amelia Gonzalez [ amelia at kpfa.org)
Acting Asisting General Manager and Development Director

Ahmad Anderson ( ahmad at pacifica.org)
Interim General Manager




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 26 12:24:30 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:24:30 -0700
Subject: [News] The July 26th Movement and the Gains of the Cuban Revolution
Message-ID: <mailman.89.1280164050.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Commemorate the July 26th Movement and the Gains of the Cuban Revolution

Today marks the 57th anniversary of the historic 
attacks on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Barracks in Cuba.

On July 26, 1953, the Cuban revolutionary forces 
launched two attacks against the Batista Regime, 
one against the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de 
Cuba and the other against the Carlos Manuel de 
Cespedes Barracks in the city of Bayamo. The 
Moncada Barracks was the military center of the 
Batista regime in the south and its second largest and most powerful garrison.

The attacks were executed by a new organization 
that was created in the mid-1952, under the 
leadership of Fidel Castro and Abel Santamar?a. 
It was a clandestine revolutionary organization, 
as yet unnamed, made up of young workers, 
students, employed persons, artisans, campesinos 
from different parts of the island. It had around 
1,500 members and the organization affiliated 
itself with previous revolutionary Cuban figures 
such as Eduardo Chib?s and Jos? Mart?. About 120 
youths were part of these attacks, approximately 
70 of whom were massacred during or after the 
event. Others, including Fidel, were subsequently 
arrested, tortured, tried and/or executed. Many, 
including Fidel, were released after an amnesty 
in May 1955. This amnesty was the result of the 
mass mobilization of Cubans in support of the 
imprisoned rebels. For example, starting in 1955, 
mothers of some prisoners and other Cuban women 
organized a campaign to free the imprisoned 
rebels. Civil society, including editors, 
intellectuals and even political leaders, issued 
a public appeal demanding ?liberty for the 
political prisoners.? That year, the Cuban 
Congress passed a bill granting general amnesty 
to political prisoners. After being signed by 
Batista, the imprisoned rebels were freed.

In response to the attacks, Batista?s regime 
escalated its repression of the progressive 
forces as never before, launching mass arrests of 
any deemed suspicious, imposing extensive 
censorship and suspending constitutional rights. 
In other words, the reaction of the Batista 
regime was to immediately and viciously 
criminalize the youth for their aspirations for a 
better world. They were attacked as violent, 
troublemakers and slandered. Batista?s regime 
knew very well that though the forces were 
defeated, it would inspire the Cuban youth and 
revolutionaries, all those who wanted a new Cuba, 
to see the possibility of it, to think bravely and defiantly.

It is also important to put these events in a 
broader historical context for Cuba. For 
centuries, the Cuban people fought for their 
liberation from the yoke of colonialism. This 
struggle was waged by a population predominantly 
made up of the descendents of African slaves 
brought into Cuba after the indigenous population 
was wiped out, and mulattos. This history 
showcases many amazing fighters and leaders still 
venerated in Cuba and around the world today such 
as Jose Marti. As the 1800s came to a close, the 
revolutionary Cuban forces were ever nearing 
their dream of liberation and dignity. A Republic 
was established through these efforts. Yet the 
U.S., the new rising Empire, would not stand for 
this. Through aggressive policies and coups 
d??tat, the Batista regime was brought into power 
with its unprecedented servility to the U.S. and 
its interests, undermining the Republic and its 
Constitution. In this context emerged what is 
called the Centenary Generation, the generation 
led by Fidel Castro, synthesizing 50 years of 
struggle against servile U.S. governments in 
Cuba. At that time, the youth were at the 
forefront of the struggle, and the University of 
Havana became one of the centers of opposition to 
the government. Thus, the July 26 attacks were a 
continuation of a long history of struggle in 
Cuba, and were a link in a long chain that led to the 1959 Revolution.

Though the battle was lost that day, it made it 
possible for the war to be won, to liberate Cuba 
from U.S. dictate and establish a people?s 
government. Thus, the significance is that of 
taking a stand. The Cuban people planted their 
flag and said to all those willing, here is the 
battle, here is where to follow. Today, the 
Barracks are now a school and the Museum of the 
Revolution. The date on which the attack took 
place, July 26, 1953, was adopted as the name of 
the revolutionary July 26th Movement which 
eventually took power in 1959. When Fidel was 
arrested after the attacks, he defended himself 
in the court. His four-hour defence was recorded 
by the court and became the platform for the July 26th Movement.

Some passages of his defense entitled ?History Will Absolve Me?:

?
 Fundamental matters of principle are being 
debated here, the right of [people] men to be 
free is on trial, the very foundations of our 
existence as a civilized and democratic nation are in the balance.

?Why were we sure of the people?s support? When 
we speak of the people we are not talking about 
those who live in comfort, the conservative 
elements of the nation, who welcome any 
repressive regime, any dictatorship, any 
despotism, prostrating themselves before the 
masters of the moment until they grind their 
foreheads into the ground. When we speak of 
struggle and we mention the people we mean the 
vast unredeemed masses, those to whom everyone 
makes promises and who are deceived by all; we 
mean the people who yearn for a better, more 
dignified and more just nation; who are moved by 
ancestral aspirations to justice, for they have 
suffered injustice and mockery generation after 
generation; those who long for great and wise 
changes in all aspects of their life; people who, 
to attain those changes, are ready to give even 
the very last breath they have when they believe 
in something or in someone, especially when they 
believe in themselves. The first condition of 
sincerity and good faith in any endeavor is to do 
precisely what nobody else ever does, that is, to 
speak with absolute clarity, without fear. The 
demagogues and professional politicians who 
manage to perform the miracle of being right 
about everything and of pleasing everyone are, 
necessarily, deceiving everyone about everything. 
The revolutionaries must proclaim their ideas 
courageously, define their principles and express 
their intentions so that no one is deceived, neither friend nor foe.

?But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the 
fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives 
of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.?

from 
http://cubacanada.org/activities/commemorate-the-july-26th-movement-and-the-gains-of-the-cuban-revolution



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 26 13:25:55 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:25:55 -0700
Subject: [News] Afghan War Leaks Expose Costly, Deceitful March of Folly
Message-ID: <mailman.92.1280165247.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>


OpEdNews

Original Content at 
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Afghan-War-Leaks-Expose-Co-by-Ray-McGovern-100726-999.html

----------
July 26, 2010

Afghan War Leaks Expose Costly, Deceitful March of Folly

By Ray McGovern

The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan 
have been laid bare in an indisputable way just days before the House 
of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 
billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly 
needed at home.

On Sunday, the Web site Wikileaks posted 75,000 reports written 
mostly by U.S. forces in Afghanistan during a six-year period from 
January 2004 to December 2009. The authenticity of the material 
published under the title 
"<http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010>Afghan War 
Diaries" is not in doubt.

The New York Times, which received an embargoed version of the 
documents from Wikileaks, devoted six pages of its Monday editions to 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26isi.html?_r=1&hp>several 
articles on the disclosures, which reveal how the Afghan War slid 
into its current morass while the Bush administration concentrated 
U.S. military efforts on Iraq.

Wikileaks also gave advanced copies to the British newspaper, The 
Guardian, and the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, thus guaranteeing 
that the U.S. Fawning Corporate Media could not ignore these 
classified cables the way it did five years ago with the "Downing 
Street Memo," a leaked British document which described how 
intelligence was "fixed" around President George W. Bush's 
determination to invade Iraq.

The Washington Post also led its Monday editions with a lengthy 
article about the Wikileaks' disclosure of the Afghan War reports.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the new evidence of a foundering 
war in Afghanistan will lead to a public groundswell of opposition to 
expending more billions of dollars there when the money is so 
critically needed to help people to keep their jobs, their homes and 
their personal dignity in the United States.

But there may be new hope that the House of Representatives will find 
the collective courage to deny further funding for feckless bloodshed 
in Afghanistan that seems more designed to protect political flanks 
in Washington than the military perimeters of U.S. bases over there.

Assange on Pentagon Papers

Wikileaks leader Julian Assange compared the release of "The Afghan 
War Diaries" to Daniel Ellsberg's release in 1971 of the Pentagon 
Papers. Those classified documents revealed the duplicitous arguments 
used to justify the Vietnam War and played an important role in 
eventually getting Congress to cut off funding.

Ellsberg's courageous act was the subject of a recent Oscar-nominated 
documentary, entitled "The Most Dangerous Man in America," named 
after one of the less profane sobriquets thrown Ellsberg's way by 
then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

I imagine Dan is happy at this point to cede that particular 
honorific to the Wikileaks' leaker, who is suspected of being Pfc. 
Bradley Manning, a young intelligence specialist in Iraq who was 
recently detained and charged with leaking classified material to Wikileaks.

An earlier Wikileaks' disclosure also reportedly from Manning 
revealed video of a U.S. helicopter crew cavalierly gunning down 
about a dozen Iraqi men, including two Reuters journalists, as they 
walked along a Baghdad street.

Wikileaks declined to say whether Manning was the source of the 
material. However, possibly to counter accusations that the leaker 
(allegedly Manning) acted recklessly in releasing thousands of secret 
military records, Wikileaks said it was still withholding 15,000 
reports "as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source."

After Ellsberg was identified as the Pentagon Papers leaker in 1971, 
he was indicted and faced a long prison sentence if convicted. 
However, a federal judge threw out the charges following disclosures 
of the Nixon administration's own abuses, such as a break-in at the 
office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

In public speeches over the past several years, Ellsberg has been 
vigorously pressing for someone to do what he did, this time on the 
misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ellsberg also has praised 
Assange for providing a means for the documents to reach the public.

Ellsberg and other members of The Truth Telling Coalition established 
on Sept. 9, 2004, have been appealing to government officials who 
encounter "deception and cover-up" on vital issues to opt for 
"unauthorized truth telling." [At the end of this story, see full 
text of the group's letter, which I signed.]

Emphasizing that "citizens cannot make informed choices if they do 
not have the facts," the Truth Telling Coalition challenged officials 
to give primary allegiance to the Constitution, and noted the 
readiness of groups like the ACLU and The Project on Government 
Oversight (POGO) to offer advice and support.

What's New?

In a taped interview, Assange noted in his understated way that, with 
the Internet, the "situation is markedly different" from Pentagon 
Papers days. "More material can be pushed to bigger audiences, and 
much sooner."

Also, the flow of information can evade the obstructions of 
traditional news gatekeepers who failed so miserably to inform the 
American people about the Bush administration's deceptions before the Iraq War.

People all over the world can get "the whole wad at once" and put the 
various reports into context, which "is not something that has 
previously occurred; that is something that can only be brought about 
as a result of the Internet," Assange said.

However, Assange also recognized the value of involving the 
traditional news media to ensure that the reports got maximum 
attention. So, he took a page from Ellsberg's experience by creating 
some competitive pressure among major news outlets, giving the 75,000 
reports to the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. 
Beginning Sunday afternoon, all three posted articles about the huge 
dump of information.

Assange noted that the classified material includes many 
heart-rending incidents that fit into the mosaic of a larger human 
catastrophe. These include one depicted in Der Spiegel's reportage of 
accidental killings on June 17, 2007, when U.S. Special Forces fired 
five rockets at a Koran school in which a prominent al-Qaeda 
functionary was believed to be hiding.

When the smoke cleared, the Special Forces found no terrorist, but 
rather six dead children in the rubble of the school and another who 
died shortly after.

Role of Pakistan

Perhaps the most explosive revelations disclose the double game being 
played by the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence 
(ISI). Der Spiegel reported: "The documents clearly show that this 
Pakistani intelligence agency is the most important accomplice the 
Taliban has outside of Afghanistan."

The documents also show ISI envoys not only are present when 
insurgent commanders hold war councils, but also give specific orders 
to carry out assassinations -- including, according to one report, an 
attempt on the life of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in August 2008.

Former Pakistani intelligence chief, Gen. Hamid Gul, is depicted as 
an important source of aid to the Taliban, and even, in another 
report, as a "leader" of the insurgents. The reports show Gul 
ordering suicide attacks, and describe him as one of the most 
important suppliers of weaponry to the Talban.

Though the Pakistani government has angrily denied U.S. government 
complaints about Gul and the ISI regarding secret ties to the Taliban 
and even to al-Qaeda, the new evidence must raise questions about 
what the Pakistanis have been doing with the billions of dollars that 
Washington has given them.

Two Ex-Generals Got It Right

We have another patriotic truth-teller to thank for leaking the texts 
of cables that Ambassador (and former Lt. Gen.) Karl Eikenberry sent 
to Washington on Nov. 6 and 9, 2009, several weeks before President 
Barack Obama made his fateful decision to send 30,000 more troops to 
Afghanistan.

In a somewhat condescending tone, Eikenberry described the request 
from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then commander of allied forces in 
Afghanistan, for more troops as "logical and compelling within his 
narrow mandate to define the needs" of the military campaign.

But then Eikenberry warned repeatedly about "unaddressed variables" 
like militants' "sanctuaries" in Pakistan. For example, the ambassador wrote:

"More troops won't end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries 
remain " and Pakistan views its strategic interests as best served by 
a weak neighbor."

In Eikenberry's final try at informing the White House discussion (in 
his cable of Nov. 9), the ambassador warned pointedly of the risk 
that "we will become more deeply engaged here with no way to 
extricate ourselves."

At the time, it seemed that Eikenberry's message was getting through 
to the White House. On Nov. 7, Der Spiegel published an interview 
with National Security Adviser (former Marine General) James Jones, 
who was asked whether he agreed with Gen. McChrystal that a 
substantial troop increase was needed. Jones replied:

"Generals always ask for more troops; I believe we will not solve the 
problem with more troops alone. You can keep on putting troops in, 
and you could have 200,000 troops there and Afghanistan will swallow 
them up as it has done in the past."

However, McChrystal and his boss, then-Central Command chief Gen. 
David Petraeus pressed the case for more troops, a position that had 
strong support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Vice 
President Dick Cheney, key hawks in Congress and Washington's 
neoconservative-dominated opinion circles.

After months of internal debate, President Obama finally caved in and 
gave McChrystal nearly all the troops that he had requested. 
(McChrystal has since been replaced by Petraeus as commander of 
forces in Afghanistan.)

Despite the fact that the Wikileaks disclosures offer fresh support 
for the doubters on the Afghan War escalation, Jones acted as the 
good soldier on Sunday, decrying the unauthorized release of 
classified information, calling Wikileaks "irresponsible."

Jones also lectured the Pakistanis:

"Pakistan's military and intelligence services must continue their 
strategic shift against insurgent groups. The balance must shift 
decisively against al-Qaeda and its extremist allies. U.S. support 
for Pakistan will continue to be focused on building Pakistani 
capacity to root out violent extremist groups."

[Note: Okay; he's a general. But the grammatical mood is just a shade 
short of imperative. And the tone is imperial/colonial through and 
through. I'll bet the Pakistanis are as much swayed by that approach 
as they have been by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's admonitions 
not to be concerned about India just terrorists.]

And regarding "progress" in Afghanistan? Jones added that "the U.S. 
and its allies have scored several significant blows against the insurgency."

However, that's not the positive spin that Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. 
Mike Mullen was offering just four weeks ago. On his way to Kabul, 
again, Mullen spoke of "recent setbacks in the Afghan campaign."

"We underestimated some of the challenges" in Marja, the rural area 
of Helmand province that was cleared in March by U.S. Marines, only 
to have Taliban fighters return. "They're coming back at night; the 
intimidation is still there," Mullen said.

Of the much more ambitious (and repeatedly delayed) campaign to 
stabilize the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Mullen said: "It's 
going to take until the end of the year to know where we are there."

Would you say yes to an additional $33.5 billion for this fool's errand?

This article appeared first on Consortiumnews.com.

Text of 2004 Appeal from Truth Telling Coalition follows:

September 9, 2004

APPEAL TO: Current Government Officials

FROM: The Truth-Telling Coalition

It is time for unauthorized truth telling.

Citizens cannot make informed choices if they do not have the 
facts--for example, the facts that have been wrongly concealed about 
the ongoing war in Iraq: the real reasons behind it, the prospective 
costs in blood and treasure, and the setback it has dealt to efforts 
to stem terrorism. Administration deception and cover-up on these 
vital matters has so far been all too successful in misleading the public.

Many Americans are too young to remember Vietnam. Then, as now, 
senior government officials did not tell the American people the 
truth. Now, as then, insiders who know better have kept their 
silence, as the country was misled into the most serious foreign 
policy disaster since Vietnam.

Some of you have documentation of wrongly concealed facts and 
analyses that--if brought to light--would impact heavily on public 
debate regarding crucial matters of national security, both foreign 
and domestic. We urge you to provide that information now, both to 
Congress and, through the media, to the public.

Thanks to our First Amendment, there is in America no broad Officials 
Secrets Act, nor even a statutory basis for the classification 
system. Only very rarely would it be appropriate to reveal 
information of the three types whose disclosure has been expressly 
criminalized by Congress: communications intelligence, nuclear data, 
and the identity of US intelligence operatives. However, this 
administration has stretched existing criminal laws to cover other 
disclosures in ways never contemplated by Congress.

There is a growing network of support for whistleblowers. In 
particular, for anyone who wishes to know the legal implications of 
disclosures they may be contemplating, the ACLU stands ready to 
provide pro bono legal counsel, with lawyer-client privilege. The 
Project on Government Oversight (POGO) will offer advice on whistle 
blowing, dissemination and relations with the media.

Needless to say, any unauthorized disclosure that exposes your 
superiors to embarrassment entails personal risk. Should you be 
identified as the source, the price could be considerable, including 
loss of career and possibly even prosecution. Some of us know from 
experience how difficult it is to countenance such costs. But 
continued silence brings an even more terrible cost, as our leaders 
persist in a disastrous course and young Americans come home in 
coffins or with missing limbs.

This is precisely what happened at this comparable stage in the 
Vietnam War. Some of us live with profound regret that we did not at 
that point expose the administration's dishonesty and perhaps prevent 
the needless slaughter of 50,000 more American troops and some 2 to 3 
million Vietnamese over the next ten years. We know how misplaced 
loyalty to bosses, agencies, and careers can obscure the higher 
allegiance all government officials owe the Constitution, the 
sovereign public, and the young men and women put in harm's way. We 
urge you to act on those higher loyalties.

A hundred forty thousand young Americans are risking their lives 
every day in Iraq for dubious purpose. Our country has urgent need of 
comparable moral courage from its public officials. Truth telling is 
a patriotic and effective way to serve the nation. The time for 
speaking out is now.

SIGNATORIES
Appeal from the Truth-Telling Coalition

Edward Costello, Former Special Agent (Counterintelligence), Federal 
Bureau of Investigation

Sibel Edmonds, Former Language Specialist, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Daniel Ellsberg, Former official, U.S. Departments of Defense and State

John D. Heinberg, Former Economist, Employment and Training 
Administration, U.S. Department of Labor

Larry C. Johnson, Former Deputy Director for Anti-Terrorism 
Assistance, Transportation Security, and Special Operations, 
Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism

Lt. Col Karen Kwiatowski, USAF (ret.), who served in the Pentagon's 
Office of Near East Planning

John Brady Kiesling, Former Political Counselor, U.S. Embassy, 
Athens, Department of State

David MacMichael, Former Senior Estimates Officer, National 
Intelligence Council, Central Intelligence Agency

Ray McGovern, Former Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency

Philip G. Vargas, Ph.D., J.D., Dir. Privacy & Confidentiality Study, 
Commission on Federal Paperwork (Author/Director: "The Vargas Report 
on Government Secrecy" -- CENSORED)

Ann Wright, Retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and U.S. Foreign Service Officer




Author's Bio: Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing 
arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. 
He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst 
for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran 
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Back




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Mon Jul 26 15:32:38 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:32:38 -0700
Subject: [News] Chavez: US and Colombia plan to attack Venezuela
Message-ID: <mailman.102.1280172769.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Saturday, July 24, 2010

http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/07/chavez-us-and-colombia-plan-to-attack.html



<http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/07/chavez-us-and-colombia-plan-to-attack.html>Chavez: 
US and Colombia plan to attack Venezuela

By Eva Golinger

Caracas, July 24, 2010 ? Venezuelan President 
Hugo Chavez denounced this Saturday US plans to 
attack his country and overthrow his government. 
During a ceremony celebrating the 227th birthday 
of Independence hero Simon Bolivar, Chavez read 
from a secret memo he had been sent from an 
unnamed source inside the United States.

?Old friend, I haven?t seen you in years. As I 
said to you in my three prior letters, the idea 
remains the generation of a conflict on your 
western border?, read Chavez from the secret missive.

?The latest events confirm all, or almost all, of 
what those here discussed as well as other 
information that I have obtained from above?, the letter continued.

?The preparation phase in the international 
community, with the help of Colombia, is in plain 
execution?, manifested the text, referring to 
last Thursday?s session in the Organization of 
American States (OAS), during which the Colombia 
government accused Venezuela of harboring 
?terrorists? and ?terrorist training camps? and 
gave the Chavez government a ?30-day ultimatum? 
to allow for international intervention.

The letter continued with more details, ?I told 
you before that the events wouldn?t begin before 
the 26th, but for some reason they have moved 
forward several actions that were supposed to be executed afterward?.

?In the United States, the execution phase is 
accelerating, together with a contention force, 
as they call it, towards Costa Rica with the 
pretext of fighting drug trafficking?.

On July 1, the Costan Rican government authorized 
46 US war ships and 7,000 marines into their maritime and land territory.
The true objective of this military mobilization, 
said the letter, is to ?support military operations? against Venezuela.

ASSASSINATION AND OVERTHROW

?There is an agreement between Colombia and the 
US with two objectives: one is Mauricio and the 
other is the overthrow of the government?, 
revealed the document. President Chavez explained 
that ?Mauricio? is a pseudynom used in these communications.

?The military operation is going to happen?, 
warned the text, ?and those from the north will 
do it, but not directly in Caracas?.
?They will hunt ?Mauricio? down outside Caracas, 
this is very important, I repeat, this is very important?.

President Chavez revealed that he had received 
similar letters from the same source alerting him 
to dangerous threats. He received one right 
before the capture of more than 100 Colombian 
paramilitaries in the outskirts of Caracas that 
were part of an assassination plan against the 
Venezuelan head of state, and another in 2002, 
just days before the coup d?etat that briefly 
outsted him from power. ?The letter warned of 
snipers and the coup?, explained Chavez, ?and it 
was right, the information was true, but we were unable to act to prevent it?.

US MILITARY EXPANSION

This information comes on the heels of the 
decision last Thursday to break relations between 
Colombia and Venezuela, made by President Chavez 
after Colombia?s ?show? in the OAS.

?Uribe is capable of anything?, warned Chavez, 
announcing that the country was on maximum altert 
and the borders were being reinforced.

Last October, Colombia and the US signed a 
military agreement permitting the US to occupy 
seven Colombian bases and to use all Colombian 
territory as needed to complete missions. One of 
the bases in the agreement, Palanquero, was cited 
in May 2009 US Air Force documents as necessary 
to ?conduct full spectrum military operations? in 
South America and combat the threat of ?anti-US governments? in the region.

Palanquero was also signaled as critical to the 
Pentagon?s Global Mobility Strategy, as outlined 
in the February 2009 White Paper: Air Mobility 
Command Global En Route Strategy, ?USSOUTHCOM has 
identified Palanquero, Colombia (German Olano 
Airfield SKPQ), as a cooperative security 
location (CSL). From this location nearly half of 
the continent can be covered by a C-17 without refueling?.

The 2010 Pentagon budget included a $46 million 
USD request to improve the installations at 
Palanquero, in order to support the Command 
Combatant?s ?Theater Posture Strategy? and 
?provide for a unique opportunity for full 
spectrum operations in a critical sub region of 
our hemisphere where security and stability is 
under constant threat from narcotics funded 
terrorist insurgencies, anti-US governments, 
endemic poverty and recurring natural disasters?.

The May 2009 Air Force document further added 
that Palanquero would be used to ?increase our 
capacity to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance 
and Reconnaissance (ISR), improve global 
reach
and expand expeditionary warfare capability?.

In February 2010, the US National Directorate of 
Intelligence (NDI) classified Venezuela as 
?Anti-US Leader? in the region in its annual threat assessment.

The US also maintains forward operation locations 
(small military bases) in Aruba and Curazao, just 
miles off the Venezuelan coast. In recent months, 
the Venezuelan government has denounced 
unauthorized incursions of drone planes and other 
military aircraft into Venezuelan territory, originating from the US bases.

These latest revelations evidence that a serious, 
and unjustified conflict is brewing fast against 
Venezuela, a country with a vibrant democracy and 
the largest oil reserves in the world.




Freedom Archives
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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 27 10:32:01 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:32:01 -0700
Subject: [News] =?iso-8859-1?q?Colombia=92s_Uribe_takes_dictation_one_last?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?__time?=
Message-ID: <mailman.131.1280241203.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



Colombia?s Uribe takes dictation one last time



July 26, 2010

http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/

Colombia: Uribe?s Farewell Spectacle - 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=722>espa?ol

Atilio A. Boron

Translation: Machetera and Manuel Talens

?lvaro Uribe, the empire?s unconditional pawn, 
took his leave from the Colombian presidency with 
a new provocation: the denunciation of FARC camps 
which he claimed to be established on Venezuelan 
territory.  Being neither dimwitted nor lazy, the 
U.S. State Department came out in unconditional 
support of the accusation put forth by Bogot? at 
the Organization of American States (OAS), 
encouraged by the supposed ?resounding? proof 
presented by Uribe, denouncing the government of 
Hugo Ch?vez for allowing the FARC camps to be set 
up and for carrying out various military training 
programs for some 1,500 guerrillas on Venezuelan 
soil.  With amazing insolence, Philip Crowley, 
the State Department spokesperson declared that 
Venezuela?s response [in terminating diplomatic 
relations with Colombia] was ?unfortunate? and 
?petulant? and threatened that ?if Venezuela 
fails to cooperate in whatever follow-on steps 
are made, the United States and other countries 
will obviously take account of that.?  It must be 
remembered that since 2006, the United States has 
included Venezuela in the list of countries that 
are unwilling to cooperate in the struggle 
against terrorism.  Assistant U.S. Secretary of 
State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo 
Valenzuela issued a declaration along the same 
lines, saying that Uribe?s denunciation was ?very 
serious.?  Both statements cast a heavy shadow of 
doubt about the intellectual capabilities of both 
officials and, what?s worse, feed the suspicion 
that with their fondness for lies, the moral 
caliber of both is not all that different from that of ?lvaro Uribe.

It?s obvious that for imperial administrators, 
they will try to make anything that is convenient 
to their interests appear before public opinion 
as something ?serious and overwhelming.?  And 
these were the interests that moved the White 
House to ask for one last ?proof of love? from 
the Colombian leader just a few days before leaving his presidency.

As is commonly known, the file that the DEA, the 
CIA and the FBI have been building on Uribe for 
his intimate and prolonged links with the drug 
cartels keeps the Colombian leader from 
disobeying any kind of order coming from 
Washington, for fear of meeting the same fate as 
the former Panamanian president Manuel A. 
Noriega, and ending his days in a maximum 
security cell in the United States. 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn1>[i]

The absurd claim from Uribe, an inveterate liar, 
comes like manna from heaven in Washington?s push 
to destabilize the Ch?vez government before the 
crucial Venezuelan elections scheduled for 
September 26th and at the same time, it 
legitimizes the impressive program of U.S. 
militarization that is being imposed on Latin 
America; one of whose leading examples has been 
the signed Obama-Uribe treaty through which 
Colombia is ceding at least seven military bases 
for the use of U.S. armed forces.  This is why 
those in the U.S. government pretend to consider 
the proof behind Uribe?s denunciation as ?serious 
and overwhelming,? knowing that it is completely 
unfounded and nothing more than pure verbiage 
backed up with photographic montages.  But lies 
are part of official U.S. discourse, essential 
elements in granting an aura of legitimacy to 
U.S. imperial designs, for a variety of reasons.

These are lies because, in the first place, if 
the FARC controls around 30% of Colombian 
territory (something that is well known in 
Colombia) it?s impossible to make sense of 
partitioning no less than 1,500 men from the 
theatre of operations, sending their leaders to 
vacation in Venezuela, and organizing 85 
guerrilla camps in a neighboring country.  If 
there is a politician who systematically lies in 
our region ? and there are plenty! ? Uribe is the 
crowning example: it?s in Colombia itself where 
the rotting oligarchic state in crisis allows for 
wide swathes of its territory, particularly in 
the jungle zones, to be controlled by guerrillas, 
narco-traffickers and paramilitaries.

After the attack that Colombian forces carried 
out on its territory, various Ecuadoran 
authorities commented that Ecuador?s northern 
border with Colombia is marked by nothing so much 
as a no-man?s land controlled by the 
organizations listed above.  With boundless 
ignorance, Uribe accuses his neighbors of not 
doing what he has amply proven unable to do 
himself: control his own territory.  Closing its 
eyes to this reality, the United States is using 
this false claim to hound the Bolivarian 
government for its lack of collaboration in the 
struggle against drug-trafficking, using the 
?free press? to hide the bothersome fact from the 
public that the greatest worldwide exporter of 
cocaine (as well as drug traffickers) is 
Colombia, militarized by Uribe and thanks to his 
invaluable collaboration, converted into a U.S. 
protectorate.  Given this picture of political 
decay, the complaint that the FARC have taken up 
residence in Venezuela ? with the support and 
complicity of Hugo Ch?vez?s government of all 
things! ? is nothing more than a vulgar deceit in 
the service of empire; an accusation that is so 
completely lacking on any basis as to be taken 
even slightly seriously.  It?s a lie that exposes 
someone as completely unscrupulous as 
Uribe.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn2>[ii]

In the second place, how can it be forgotten that 
Uribe was the man who lied so treacherously when 
his military forces, supported by those of the 
United States, made their incursion onto 
Ecuadoran territory, alleging that they were going after a column of the FARC?

Forensic evidence showed that the guerrillas who 
they were supposedly chasing after a 
confrontation that took place on Colombian 
territory were sleeping ? dressed in pajamas, 
even ? when the attack took place, and therefore, 
what took place at Santa Rosa de Sucumb?os was 
not a battle but a plain and simple 
slaughter.  This operation, carried out shortly 
after midnight on March 1st, 2008, occurred with 
the logistic and material support of  U.S. 
Americans housed at the Manta airbase in Ecuador, 
the only people with the aircraft and technology 
capable of the astonishingly accurate bombing of 
the jungle in the absolute dead of night.

One more example of Uribe?s unhealthy fondness 
for the lie was the story put forth about the 
famous laptop belonging to Ra?l Reyes, which with 
unprecedented technological prowess survived 
unscathed from a bombing that destroyed 
everything in its path and whose hard drive would 
go on to produce extremely valuable information 
about the extensive contacts of Reyes and the 
FARC with all of the enemies of Uribe and the 
United 
States.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn3>[iii]

Third, how can a man be believed, who from the 
presidency of Colombia validated the actions of 
paramilitaries and state terrorism?  On February 
16th of this year, the ?Justice and Peace? unit 
of the Colombian Attorney General?s office 
published a report in which it was revealed that 
more than 4,000 paramilitaries from the United 
Self Defense Forces of Columbia (Autodefensas 
Unidas de Colombia ? AUC) said that they had 
perpetrated 30,470 murders in the period 
beginning in the 1980?s, until their 
?demobilization? in 2003-2006.  Not only that: 
the Colombian Attorney General also took 
statements from paramilitaries accounting for 
1,085 murders, 1,438 forced recruitments of 
minors, 2,530 forced disappearances, 2,326 forced 
displacements and 1,642 extortions, as well as 1,033 kidnappings.

Despite this woeful record, Uribe is considered 
by his bosses in Washington to be a champion in 
the struggle for human 
rights.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn4>[iv] 
In this regard, if the long-awaited Free Trade 
Agreement (FTA) between Colombia and the United 
States has still not been ratified by the U.S. 
Congress, it?s because, as the conservative 
Colombian newspaper El Tiempo points out, in 2009 
alone, the paramilitaries and ?security forces? 
killed 40 trade union leaders, turning Colombia 
into the most dangerous country in the world for 
this kind of activity.  Out of a total of 76 
union leaders killed worldwide, 52% of these 
murders took place in a country that the United 
States considers a paradigmatic example of the 
struggle for human rights and the struggle 
against terrorism.  The United Central of 
Colombian Workers (Central ?nica de Trabajadores 
de Colombia) reported just a few months ago that 
2,721 activists and leaders of that organization 
were killed by ?security forces? since its 
founding in 
1986.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn5>[v] 
Despite this, Colombia?s democratic credentials 
have never been in doubt in Washington. 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn6>[vi]

Fourth, the denouncer is no less than the person 
intellectually and politically responsible for 
the serial murders known as ?false 
positives.?  As pointed out in a series of notes 
published in Colombia by Cr?nicon: The Latin 
American Observer, during these last three years 
of the Uribe government, the balance sheet is 
dismal.  It proved that in response to the 
government?s pressure to show concrete results in 
the struggle against guerrillas, the Colombian 
Army designed and carried out a criminal plan: 
moving through the country?s poorest villages and 
towns with offers of work among the huge masses 
of unemployed, the Army recruited a high number 
of poor, defenseless peasants and marginalized 
youth, who were later killed in cold blood, with 
their bodies dressed up afterwards as guerrillas 
killed in combat, in order to charge the bounty 
set up by the government and obtain bonuses or military career advancement.

According to very conservative estimates, these 
State crimes, perpetrated while the future 
Colombian president, Juan M. Santos, was the 
Defense Minister, surpassed 1,700 cases. 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn7>[vii] 
Another facet of this criminal policy under the 
misnomer of democratic security, is provided in 
the discovery which came to light on February 16, 
2010, of  ?the largest mass grave in modern 
history of the American continent, a horrendous 
discovery that has been made practically 
completely invisible? by the mainstream press in 
Colombia and around the world.  ?The mass grave, 
in La Macarena, in the Department of Meta, 
contains the remains of at least 2,000 people, 
(and was discovered) thanks to the perseverance 
of the family members of the disappeared and the 
visit of a delegation of union members and 
members of the British parliament who came to 
Colombia in December of 2009 to investigate the 
human rights situation.? It?s worth adding that 
this area had been an object of close attention 
by the Colombian armed forces since 2005, with 
the awful results that were recently 
revealed.<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn8>[viii]

As with all the state terrorism that struck the 
region during the 1970?s, the crimes against 
humanity committed by their perpetrators also had 
a financial basis.  In the case of Uribe?s 
Colombia, with his troupe of bloodthirsty freaks, 
millions of hectares left behind by the 
campesinos in their desperate exodus from the 
bombings and indiscriminate slaughters they faced 
were parceled out between the corrupt armed 
forces, the paramilitaries and the 
drug-traffickers.  As Jomary Orteon Osorio, from 
the Colombian Lawyers Collective stated at a 
conference of the U.N. Committee on Economic, 
Social and Cultural Rights (OHCHR) convened in 
Geneva at the beginning of May this year, the 
figure for displaced peasants would reach 
4,500,000, and their lands would later be 
transferred, to the great benefit of those 
charged with their displacement: to the 
landowners and agribusiness, the sponsors and 
financers of the paramilitaries.  At this same 
conference it was established that despite these 
?successes? of the Uribe government, the number 
of displaced persons continues to grow at the 
rate of 150,000 people per year.  The Colombian 
Planning Minister, Esteban Piedrahita Uribe, head 
of the Colombian delegation at the conference, 
did not deny the allegations and limited himself 
to saying that ?we have confiscated 2,000,000 
hectares from criminal groups who illegally 
seized these lands and now justice will decide 
their return to their rightful owners.? 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn9>[ix] 
In any case, it must be emphasized that the 
calculation of the number of expropriated 
hectares in this savage remaking of the process 
of primitive accumulation of capital that Marx 
described in his famous Chapter 24 of the first 
volume of Capital is subject to heated 
controversy.  There are those who maintain that 
the number of hectares transferred in this manner 
reaches 6 million, but there are others who put 
the figure at around 10 million.  In any case, 
whatever the number finally established beyond 
any doubt, it?s certain that if the policy of 
democratic security did anything at all, it was 
to secure the expropriation of the peasant masses 
and their holdings in favor of capitalist 
agribusiness. 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_edn10>[x]

This is the man who now raises his accusing 
finger against the Bolivarian revolution.  It?s 
obvious that it is just one more maneuver, 
dictated by the empire?s strategists, to harass 
the government of Hugo Ch?vez and legitimize the 
policy of ?hard power? of which it seems Obama 
has become even more enamored than his 
ignominious predecessor, despite the official 
declarations and writings of certain analysts 
close to the White House such as Joseph Nye, who 
insistently speak of the advantages of ?soft 
power? (traditional diplomacy) or ?smart power,? 
(intelligent power, new diplomacy) over the high 
cost and brutality of the former.  However, the 
empire insists on the hard power at its 
impressive military disposition: therefore, the 
bases in Colombia; in Aruba and Cura?ao only a 
few kilometers away from the Venezuelan coast; 
those in both El Salvador and Honduras and, now, 
the authorization to introduce no less than 7,000 
Marines and all kinds of weapons as well as 
aircraft carriers, helicopters, amphibious ships 
and latest generation airplanes in neighboring Costa Rica.

That?s also the reason for the Fourth Fleet?s 
presence. In this way, Uribe?s government 
performs a service of extraordinary importance in 
the facilitation of imperialism?s destabilizing, 
counter-constituent plans: unable to protect its 
586 kilometer border with Ecuador, where it has 
dedicated barely 8 tiny military detachments, and 
even less unable to do so along the 2,216 
kilometers of the Colombian-Venezuelan border ? 
transformed into a free-for-all zone for drug 
dealers and paramilitary ? it is trying by all 
possible means to create the conditions that 
would justify U.S. military intervention in South 
America; for the moment, the tension between 
Colombia and Venezuela following the presidential 
succession remains, preventing Santos from 
modifying the agenda of permanent confrontation 
instituted by Uribe against the Bolivarian 
revolution and muddying the waters so that Ch?vez 
will arrive at the September elections totally 
worn out and internationally harassed.

Worried about his personal future and burdened by 
the specter of Noriega rotting away in a Yankee 
jail cell, or being sued before the International 
Criminal Court, Uribe is making every effort 
until his last day in office to show his total 
submission to the dictates of imperialism. For 
that reason two things are of utmost importance: 
exposure of the man who is reporting the crime 
and demanding the UNASUR?s immediate intervention 
to deactivate Washington?s plans for Our America. 
This is not a case for the OAS (an organization 
that failed to defuse Uribe?s provocation) but 
for UNASUR, which with this incident, will be put 
to the test. Hopefully this newborn organization 
of South American countries will act immediately 
? right away ? otherwise, it may be too late to 
avoid the serious consequences of all kinds that 
could result if the warmongering U.S. project 
implemented by Washington and its Latin American 
proxies is carried to its conclusion.

[i] See the following declassified document at 
the U.S. National Security Archive: ?U.S. 
INTELLIGENCE LISTED COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT URIBE 
AMONG ?IMPORTANT COLOMBIAN NARCO-TRAFFICKERS? IN 1991?, in:

<http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/index.htm>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/index.htm

<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_ednref2>[ii] 
At a border more than 2,000 kilometers long with 
few natural demarcations like great rivers, lakes 
or mountain ranges, many people (not just 
ordinary ones but also drug dealers, 
paramilitary, smugglers, criminals) can cross 
back and forth as many times as they please. But 
to assume that the Ch?vez government endorses the 
establishment of sanctuaries for guerrilla 
training camps in Venezuela  only speaks of the 
absolute dishonesty and lack of moral scruples of 
Uribe and his bosses in Washington.

<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_ednref3>[iii] 
See the compelling evidence contributed by 
Margarita Vallejo and Horacio L?pez in , El 
ataque de Colombia en territorio ecuatoriano : 
detr?s de las palabras y los hechos (Buenos 
Aires: Ediciones del Centro Cultural de la Cooperaci?n, 2009)

<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/colombias-uribe-takes-dictation-one-last-time/#_ednref4>[iv] 
See 
<http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/%20secciones/nota/66984-NN/ex-paramilitares-colombianos-%20reconocen-haber-cometido-cerca-de-30-mil-500-asesinatos/>http://www.telesurtv.net/noticias/ 
secciones/nota/66984-NN/ex-paramilitares-colombianos- 
reconocen-haber-cometido-cerca-de-30-mil-500-asesinatos/

[v] Cf. 
<http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/justicia/asesinados-40-sindicalistas-el-ano-pasado-en-colombia-denuncia-organizacion-de-trabajadores_7120268-1>http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/justicia/asesinados-40-sindicalistas-el-ano-pasado-en-colombia-denuncia-organizacion-de-trabajadores_7120268-1

[vi]  To the previous should be added the 27 
journalists killed for exercising their 
profession during the eight years of Uribe`s 
rule. Other sources claim a much larger number.

[vii] Cf. Fernando Arellano?s Cronic?n 
<http://www.cronicon.net/paginas/cronicon_menu.htm>http://www.cronicon.net/paginas/cronicon_menu.htm

[viii]  Cf. 
<http://www.publico.es/internacional/288773/aparece/colombia/fosa/comun/cad%C3%A1veres>http://www.publico.es/internacional/288773/aparece/colombia/fosa/comun/cad?veres; 
and also

<http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=99507>http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=99507

[ix] See the website of the conservative radio 
and television network Cadena Caracol, May 4th, 
2010 
<http://www.caracol.com.co/nota.aspx?id=1019108>http://www.caracol.com.co/nota.aspx?id=1019108

[x] See the data provided by the MOVICE, 
Movimiento Nacional de V?ctimas de Cr?menes de 
Estado: 4.5 million displaced peasants as of 2009:

<http://www.movimientodevictimas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=278&Itemid=64>http://www.movimientodevictimas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=278&Itemid=64

Expropriated agricultural surface, 2009:

<http://www.movimientodevictimas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=274&Itemid=69>http://www.movimientodevictimas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=274&Itemid=69

Argentinean sociologist and author Atilio Boron is a friend of Tlaxcala.

Machetera and Manuel Talens are members of 
<http://www.tlaxcala.es/>Tlaxcala, the network of 
translators for linguistic diversity. This 
translation may be reprinted as long as the 
content remains unaltered, and the source, author, and translators are cited.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 27 11:17:18 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:17:18 -0700
Subject: [News] Palestine - Hey Hollywood,
 time to put your money where your  morality is
Message-ID: <mailman.140.1280243849.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



'Hope' Floats: Hey Hollywood, time to put your money where your morality is

By 
<http://palestinethinktank.com/author/nima-shirazi/>Nima 
Shirazi ? Jul 27th, 2010
http://palestinethinktank.com/2010/07/27/nima-shirazi-hope-floats-hey-hollywood-time-to-put-your-money-where-your-morality-is/

A coalition of nearly twenty U.S.-based human 
rights and peace groups has joined the global 
justice community and numerous foreign 
governments in vowing to send more humanitarian 
aid ships to break the 
<http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/06/201061452646659588.html>illegal 
Israeli blockade of Gaza this coming Fall. The 
coalition, united under the mantle 
<http://ustogaza.org/>US To Gaza, includes 
activist organizations such as CodePink, Jews Say 
No, Veterans For Peace, Voices for Creative 
Non-Violence, and Jewish Voice For Peace.

In the wake of the 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/iara-lee/the-video-israel-doesnt-w_b_621788.html>deadly 
Israeli raid on an international 
<http://www.sott.net/articles/show/209749-Israel-Deliberately-Murdered-Civilians-Aboard-Freedom-Flotilla-Says-Eyewitness-and-Victim>flotilla 
carrying over 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid and 
hundreds of civilian passengers, during which 
<http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2010/06/putting-names-to-faces.html>nine 
activists were 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/04/gaza-flotilla-activists-autopsy-results>murdered 
(if not outright 
<http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=178617>executed) 
by Israeli commandos in international waters, the 
global call to end the US-backed Israeli siege has grown even more forceful.

Later this year, boats from Europe, Canada, South 
Africa, India, and the Middle East are expected 
to set sail for Gaza once again. US To Gaza, 
which states on its 
<http://ustogaza.blogspot.com/>website that 
"America pays for the blockade with our tax 
dollars; Americans must join together to end this 
collective punishment of 1.5 million 
Palestinians," aims to add a vital American 
element to this new Freedom Flotilla.

The U.S. boat, which will be named The Audacity 
of Hope (irony intended), is expected to carry an 
American peace delegation of forty to sixty 
passengers and will join its international 
flotilla partners en route. But purchasing a 
suitable ship, securing a sailing crew, obtaining 
the needed licenses and registration, gathering 
tons of humanitarian aid, and sailing for Gaza is 
a costly endeavor. It is estimated that at least 
$370,000 needs to be raised from private donors 
in the next month for the U.S. ship to become, 
not merely hopeful audacity, but a necessary reality.

All in all, $370,000 isn't that much money. For 
instance, South Carolina Republican Congressman 
Joe Wilson 
<http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/10/you-lie-outburst-a-fundraising-boon-for-rep-joe-wilson.html>raised 
hundreds of thousands of 
<http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/11/wilson.fundraising/index.html>dollars 
from 
<http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/10/joe-wilsons-you-lie-outburst-h.html>individual 
donors giving less than $200 just because he 
called Barack Obama a liar. If a jackass like 
Wilson can raise that kind of money for shouting 
a 
<http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/09/joe-wilson/joe-wilson-south-carolina-said-obama-lied-he-didnt/>disingenuous 
falsehood, raising funds for a just cause like 
breaking the illegal Gaza blockade shouldn't be that hard.

Sure, the fund-raising goal can be hit with 3,700 
people each pledging $100 or a mere 370 donations 
of $1,000 each. But why is the bar for funding 
justice and fighting illegal 
<http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE15/021/2008/en>collective 
punishment so low? Where are the big donors who 
could single-handedly buy a boat and subsidize 
the entire delegation? Why does it seem like such 
a stretch for American supporters of human rights 
and international law to send an armada of siege-breaking ships to Gaza?

Perhaps, in order to open borders and ship a 
little bit of hope to suffering Palestinians in 
the Middle East, US to Gaza organizers should be 
looking for a lot of financial support from open wallets on the West Coast.

Hollywood has no shortage of outspoken Israel 
supporters, ethnic cleansing enthusiasts, and 
racist, right-wing nutjobs. The Zionism, publicly 
professed or not, of famous musicians and movie 
stars takes many forms and runs the gamut of 
willful ignorance to actively insane.

There are those who ignore or condemn the 
<http://bdsmovement.net/>Boycott, Divestment, and 
Sanctions Movement and promote Israeli 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/udi-aloni-seinfeld-you-were-wrong-to-condemn-our-toronto-protest-1.7469>hasbara 
like 
<http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2008/02/all-you-need-is-apartheid.html>Paul 
McCartney, 
<http://www.popeater.com/2010/06/18/elton-john-israel-tel-aviv-concert/>Elton 
John, 
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6822777.ece>Madonna, 
<http://usacbi.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/rod-stewart-concert-not-cancelled-but-boycott-momentum-growing/>Rod 
Stewart, Bob 
<http://ellissharp.blogspot.com/2005/09/bob-dylans-racist-song_25.html>Dylan, 
<http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/09/24/entertainment/main5336146.shtml>Leonard 
Cohen, 
<http://palestinenote.com/cs/blogs/news/archive/2010/07/01/hits-and-misses-which-musicians-are-boycotting-israel.aspx>Metallica, 
Rihanna, 
<http://www.thejc.com/news/israel-news/35649/missy-elliot-ignores-israel-boycott-campaign>Missy 
Elliot, 
<http://news.softpedia.com/news/Adam-Sandler-Wants-to-Fight-Against-Terrorism-33306.shtml>Adam 
Sandler, 
<http://fpfd.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/is-alex-trebek-putting-u-s-interests-in-jeopardy/>Alex 
Trebek, 
<http://current.com/entertainment/movies/90948471_we-dont-need-another-blacklist.htm>Seth 
Rogen, Robert Duvall, Halle Berry, Lenny Kravitz, 
Ed Zwick, Chazz Palminteri, Paul Reiser, 
<http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/September2009/10/c4132.html>David 
Cronenberg, Norman Jewison, Saul Rubinek, 
<http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/news/seinfeld-sacha-baron-cohen-and-natalie-portman-slam-toronto-film-festival-protest-1.7828>Jerry 
Seinfeld, Lisa Kudrow, Sacha Baron Cohen, 
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollywoodjew/item/toronto_protest_escalates_as_stars_sign_federation_ad_against_tel_aviv_boyc/>Minnie 
Driver, and Natalie Portman (who was also a proud 
<http://www.natalieportman.com/articles/nparticles_en.php?viewarticle=1&article_number=363>research 
assistant of Alan Dershowitz and is thanked in 
his appalling book The Case for Israel); there 
are those who 
<http://ayulittleone.blogsome.com/images/terrorad081706.jpg>oppose 
resistance to Israeli aggression and expansion 
and laud Israeli assaults that take the lives of 
thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians 
like actors Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, 
Bruce Willis, Danny De Vito, Don Johnson, James 
Woods, Kelly Preston, Patricia Heaton, Doug 
Liman, Gary Sinise, Kristen Chenowith, Michael 
Chiklis, Vivica A. Fox, Nicole Kidman, Pat Sajak, 
and William Hurt, along with filmmakers like 
Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, William 
Friedkin, Ivan Reitman, Richard Donner, and Sam Raimi.

There are those, like producer Lawrence Bender, 
who see Israel as an eternal victim, besieged by 
oppressive Palestinians, and 
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/community_briefs/article/israel_to_seek_celebrity_support_20030829/>claim 
that "Nobody realizes how badly the Israelis are 
suffering. Obviously the Palestinians are 
suffering ? but people need to understand that 
Israel needs help" and there are those, like 
actor Joshua Malina, who are 
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/community_briefs/article/israel_to_seek_celebrity_support_20030829/>baffled 
by the 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-israel-feels-under-siege-like-a-victim-an-underdog-1886332.html>suggestion 
that "somehow Israel is the bully and the Palestinians are the underdog."

There are Zionist zealots like 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk0513.html>John 
Malkovich and 
<http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2010/05/ridiculest-bill-mahers-cultural.html>Bill 
Maher and there's also 
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/22/dear-mr-president-jon-voight/>Jon 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/actor-jon-voight-god-gave-this-land-to-the-jewish-people-1.285266>Voigt.

There are celebrities who advocate for peace, 
love, and understanding, like 
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_n5_v57/ai_13705084/pg_5/>Richard 
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/community_briefs/article/israel_to_seek_celebrity_support_20030829/>Dreyfuss, 
yet somehow believe a "Jewish" state isn't 
inherently discriminatory. There's Jason 
Alexander, who, despite his 
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7768/is_20100527/ai_n54115675/>work 
with the two-state promoting 
<http://www.onevoicemovement.org/>OneVoice/<http://imaginepeace.com/archives/7337>Imagine 
Peace project, was an 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4iCCxYdUlI&feature=player_embedded>honored 
guest at last year's Friends of the Israeli 
Defense Forces [sic] Fundraising Gala and shill 
for Jewish 
<http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/03/jewish-life-tv-promoting-radical-settler-ideology-endorsed-by-jason-alexander-and-sponsored-by-jdate/>television 
programming that endorses violent, fanatical 
Zionist settler ideologies. There are fashion 
designers like Elie Tahari, who 
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=170694>donated 
a whopping $100,000 at this year's IDF love-fest in March.

With friends like these, it's no wonder that the 
IDF, a foreign military that oppresses and 
occupies an indigenous population, 
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=170694>raised 
over $20 million in one night at the 
Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. But donors here in 
the United States don't only fund the Occupation, 
they also fund 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/08/us-settlers-hebron-fund-israeli>illegal 
Jewish settlements ? to the tune of 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/world/middleeast/06settle.html?_r=2&hp>tax-free 
hundreds of millions over the past decade ? that 
have now 
<http://adalahny.org/index.php/press-releases/38-press-release-other/329-release-hebron-mets-cancel>aggressively 
stolen and 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/exposed-the-truth-about-israels-land-grab-in-the-west-bank-2020110.html>colonized 
over 42% of the West Bank.

So where are their anti-occupation, 
pro-international law counterparts, especially 
the ones with equally deep pockets? The truth is they're everywhere.

 From 
<http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/07/28/overcoming-speechlessness-alice-walker-in-gaza.htm>Alice 
<http://www.alicewalkersblog.com/2009/07/overcoming-speechlessness-poet.html>Walker 
to 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvMoGAy7q9c>Vanessa 
Redgrave, 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2009/09/toronto-film-fest-protest-grows-to-over-1000-supporters-including-harry-belafonte-julie-christie-and-viggo-mortensen.html>Harry 
Belafonte to 
<http://torontodeclaration.blogspot.com/>Viggo 
Mortensen, Julie Christie, Wallace Shawn, 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/28/usa.israel>Alan 
Rickman, 
<http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/02/26/please-listen-before-it-is-too-late.htm>Jonathan 
Demme, Stephen King, Ralph Fiennes, Bill Irwin, 
Tilda Swinton, Wim Wenders, Uma Thurman, Debra 
Winger, 
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413>Tony 
Kushner, 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2009/09/roger-ebert-amends-his-review-of-the-toronto-protest.html>Roger 
Ebert, 
<http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=2122&CategoryId=14>Richard 
Gere, 
<http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_05_22_cusack.mp3>John 
Cusack, 
<http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=22619>Sally 
Kirkland, Terry Gilliam, 
<http://palfest.org/authorsblog.html>Michael 
<http://palfest.org/Author/michael_palin.html>Palin, 
<http://www.thejewishpress.com/pageroute.do/37560>Danny 
Glover, Oliver Stone, Ed Asner, 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/dec/15/israel.guardianletters>Sophie 
Fiennes, 
<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0614-02.htm>Casey 
Kasem, and Jeremy Pikser, celebrity support for 
Palestinian freedom and an end to the Israeli 
occupation and blockade is widespread in Tinseltown.

Actresses Salma Hayek, Halle Berry, Drew 
Barrymore, Brooke Shields, Andie MacDowell, Lucy 
Liu, Whitney Houston and Sharon Stone all had 
their pictures 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10045.shtml>removed 
from the website of blood diamond dealer Lev 
Leviev after being alerted to Leviev's criminal 
funding of illegal West Bank settlements.

Musicians like 
<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0614-02.htm>Mos 
Def, Laurie Anderson, Boots Riley, Steve Earle, 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2009/09/toronto-film-fest-protest-grows-to-over-1000-supporters-including-harry-belafonte-julie-christie-and-viggo-mortensen.html>David 
Byrne, 
<http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/02/26/please-listen-before-it-is-too-late.htm>Neil 
Young, and 
<http://www.artistsagainstapartheid.org/?p=960>Santana, 
all publicly oppose Israel's systematic 
oppression and land theft and support the 
<http://www.pacbi.org/>Palestinian Campaign for 
the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel. 
<http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2009/01/02/annie_lennox_speaks_out_against_israeli_>Annie 
Lennox and 
<http://www.nme.com/news/brian-eno/41904>Brian 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/eno01022009.html>Eno 
spoke out against the 2008-9 Israel slaughter of 
over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza and, more 
recently, Rage Against The Machine's 
<http://samuelnichols.blogspot.com/2010/06/rage-against-machine-denounces-israeli.html>Alex 
de la Rocha condemned Israel's Gaza blockade 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jun/07/rage-against-the-machine-review>on 
stage during a concert in London. This past 
Saturday, July 10, for the first time in five 
years, Pink Floyd's 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/17386/179757>David 
Gilmour and 
<http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/06/roger-waters-to-israel-tear-down-the-wall/>Roger 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4649.shtml>Waters 
teamed up to 
<http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38207130/ns/today-entertainment/>perform 
at a <http://www.hopingfoundation.org/>HOPING 
Foundation benefit, which 
<http://mycatbirdseat.com/2010/07/pink-floyd-unite-for-a-palestine-benefit-concert-in-england/>raised 
?350,000 (over $538,000) for Palestinian children 
living in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, 
Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The organization was 
co-founded by fashion designer (and Siggy's 
great-granddaughter) 
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/5254030.stm>Bell 
Freud in 2003.

Megastars Dustin Hoffman and Meg Ryan 
<http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Entertainment/Article.aspx?ID=180671>canceled 
their attendance at this year's annual Jerusalem 
Film Festival the day after Israel's bloody raid 
on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and recent 
performances by 
<http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/06/israel-pixies-cancel-israel-concert-and-other-flotilla-fallout.html>The 
Pixies, Elvis Costello, Gorillaz Sound System, 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/klaxons-and-gorillaz-sound-system-cancel-israel-shows-apparently-due-to-gaza-flotilla-raid-1.294191>The 
Klaxons, 
<http://www.jewlicious.com/2010/06/cultural-boycott-recent-cancellations-by-international-musicians-spur-debate-in-israeli-public/>Devendra 
Banhart, 
<http://palestinenote.com/cs/blogs/news/archive/2010/07/01/hits-and-misses-which-musicians-are-boycotting-israel.aspx>Gil 
Scott Heron, and Snoop Dogg were also 
<http://www.forward.com/articles/128185/>canceled 
for similar ? if not identical ? reasons.

All of these well-heeled celebrities should take 
their courageous 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9515.shtml>boycott 
of Israeli apartheid and aggression even further 
by funding more humanitarian aid ships. With 
their help, supplementing the support of small 
donors, the 
<http://gazaflotilla.delegitimize.com/factsheets/the-gaza-siege/>illegal 
blockade can indeed be broken.

The Israeli policy of 
<http://gazaflotilla.delegitimize.com/factsheets/humanitarian-crisis-in-the-gaza-strip-faq/>brutal 
blockade is clear. In 2006, after Palestinians 
democratically elected Hamas to the shock and 
chagrin of both Israel and the US (who had 
insisted on the elections in the first place), an 
economic and commercial siege was put into place 
by Israel as a 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/16/israel>punishment 
for Palestinian self-determination. As Dov 
Weisglass, adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister 
Ehud Olmert, 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/levy02202006.html>jokingly 
declared, "It's like an appointment with a 
dietitian. The Palestinians in Gaza will get a lot thinner, but won't die."

Collective punishment, via forced deprivation and 
near-starvation, is unequivocally illegal. 
International law is quite clear in this regard. 
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which 
has governed Israel's occupation of the West Bank 
and Gaza since 1967 (and has been repeatedly 
affirmed by both the UN Security Council and General Assembly), states plainly:

"No protected person may be punished for an 
offence he or she has not personally committed. 
Collective penalties and likewise all measures of 
intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."

Furthermore, though the Israeli intention may not 
have been to kill Palestinians in Gaza via food 
and medicine shortages, they have more than made 
up for it with their subsequent use of bombs, 
missiles, tank shells, bullets, depleted uranium, 
flechettes, white phosphorous, and DIME weaponry.

Still, Israeli officials such as former-Prime 
Minster, now Defense Minister, Ehud Barak and 
Director-General of the Foreign Ministry, Yossi 
Gal, 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-gaza-aid-convoy-can-unload-cargo-in-ashdod-for-inspection-1.292560>continue 
to claim that "there is no shortage in 
humanitarian aid to Gaza, as food, fuel and 
supplies are regularly transferred into Gaza by international organizations."

No mention is made of the fact that all building 
material, such as cement, plaster and dry wall, 
is banned from entering Gaza, in 
<http://gazaflotilla.delegitimize.com/factsheets/humanitarian-crisis-in-the-gaza-strip-faq/>addition 
to the absurd 
<http://www.economist.com/node/16264970>prohibition 
of so-called "dual use" medicines, rope, wood, 
razors, light bulbs, textiles and fabrics, sewing 
and hypodermic needles, sewing machines, candles, 
matches, mattresses, bedsheets, pillowcases, 
blankets, cutlery, books, newspapers, coffee, 
tea, cigarettes, clothing, shoes, pencils and 
paper, fresh meat, seeds, nuts, cilantro, sage, 
cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, cumin, vinegar, 
biscuits, candy, potato chips, jam, chocolate, 
french fries, canned or dried fruit, notebooks, 
empty flowerpots, fishing rods or line, 
livestock, musical instruments, and children's toys.

Obviously, Israeli officials take no note of the 
findings of the Food and Agriculture Organization 
of the UN which has reported that 
<http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/47d4e277b48d9d3685256ddc00612265/9a265f2a909e9a1d8525772e004fc34b?OpenDocument>61% 
of Gazans are "food insecure," of which 
"<http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/47d4e277b48d9d3685256ddc00612265/9a265f2a909e9a1d8525772e004fc34b?OpenDocument>65% 
are children under 18 years;" the level of anemia 
in infants is as high as 65.5%, about 70% of 
Gazans live on less than $1 a day, 75% rely on 
food aid, and 60% have no daily access to water.

As Rebecca Sargent of the Peace and Collaborative 
Development Network 
<http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/profiles/blogs/freedom-flotilla-and-israeli?xg_source=activity>notes, 
"Much of the population remains unemployed and 
thus have no money to buy supplies for 
themselves. The 
<http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/sc9567.doc.htm>UN 
resolution 1860 calls for the unfettered access 
of aid and commercial goods to Gaza, although it 
would appear this call has been mostly ignored by 
the Israeli government's blockade."

Also, as of the end of 2009, a 
<http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33334&Cr=gaza&Cr1>U.N. 
report found that "insufficient food and medicine 
is reaching Gazans, producing a further 
deterioration of the mental and physical health 
of the entire civilian population since Israel 
launched Operation Cast Lead against the 
territory," and also "blamed the blockade for 
continued breakdowns of the electricity and 
sanitation systems due to the Israeli refusal to 
let spare parts needed for repair get through the 
crossings." Since 
<http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=89302>June 
2007, "the number of Palestine refugees unable to 
access food and lacking the means to purchase 
even the most basic items, such as soap, school 
stationery and safe drinking water, has tripled" 
and over 80 UN and aid agencies 
<http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/gaza_agriculture_25_05_2010_press_release_english.pdf>agree 
that "the formal economy in Gaza has collapsed."

On May 31, the six-ship Gaza Freedom Flotilla was 
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/33719681/IHH-report-on-the-Freedom-Flotilla>lethally 
attacked in international waters (the ships had 
no intention of sailing through Israeli 
territory) about 80 miles (130 kilometers) off 
the Gaza coast in an early morning raid by elite 
Israeli commandos. The attack was conducted after 
Israel cut off all communications from the ships 
and 
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37442104/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/>surrounded 
the flotilla with over 20 naval vessels and 
warships, along with multiple helicopters. In 
addition to the 45 highly-trained and 
heavily-armed 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/01/gaza-flotilla-eyewitness-accounts-gunfire>commandos 
who rappelled onto the largest ship, the 
Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, murdering at least 
9 civilians and wounding about 60 more, about 650 
other Israeli troops, including surveillance and 
support troops alongside those who actually 
boarded the ships, took part in the illegal assault on the flotilla.

The Mavi Marmara carried 10,000 tons of 
humanitarian aid on board including 6,000 tons of 
cement, more than 2,000 tons of iron, 100 
prefabricated houses, 500 wheelchairs, crutches, 
medical equipment, wood and glass for building, 
electric generators, water purifiers, a mobile 
dental care facility, and food and had even been 
<http://http//blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2010/06/01/evidence-belies-israeli-claim>confirmed 
not to be transporting any weaponry by authorities before its departure.

Another aid ship, the 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2010/06/a-look-at-the-mv-rachel-corrie.html>MV 
Rachel Corrie, carrying 550 tons of cement, 20 
tons of paper for printing school books, 25 tons 
of school supplies, 12 tons of sports equipment 
and 150 tons of medical supplies, was also 
<http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/05/the_legal_posit.html>illegally 
<http://firedoglake.com/2010/06/05/mv-rachel-corrie-seized-passengers-kidnapped-by-israel/>seized 
by the Israeli Navy a few days later.

On June 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 
Netanyahu announced an "easing" of the 
four-year-long Gaza siege, 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/netanyahu-to-human-rights-activists-sail-to-tehran-not-gaza-1.297914>declaring, 
"Today, after we lifted the civilian blockade of 
Gaza there is no reason or justification for further flotillas."

Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz 
<http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/government-approves-plan-to-dramatically-ease-gaza-blockade-1.297327>reports 
that "The highlight of the new policy is to be 
the creation and distribution of a detailed 
'black list' of goods that will not be permitted 
into the Gaza Strip," continuing that, now, "Only 
weapons or 'dual-use' materials that could be 
used to manufacture weapons will be on the list. 
Any item not on the list will be permitted into Gaza."

As a result of this new policy, items such as 
<http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90777/90854/7035660.html>car 
parts, agricultural and fishing tools, cosmetics, 
perfumes, 
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=177943>soda, 
juice, jam, spices, shaving cream, potato chips, 
cookies and candy are now being imported into Gaza.

Nevertheless, the siege has 
<http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0621/breaking30.html>not 
ended. Even though coriander, chocolate, and 
Coca-Cola are now allowed through Israel's 
military checkpoints, goods such as cement, 
steel, iron, fertilizers, gas tanks, drilling 
equipment and water disinfectant are still 
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioi_0jtO9RjMwPNRoXNCndRPRq3gD9GP6FNO0>prohibited. 
In fact, The Los Angeles Times 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/06/world/la-fg-israel-gaza-20100706>reveals 
that "the new list of banned and restricted 
items, which fills several hundred pages, still 
includes goods and supplies vital to Gaza's economic recovery."

Consequently, Karin Laub of Associated Press 
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioi_0jtO9RjMwPNRoXNCndRPRq3gD9GP6FNO0>reports 
that "because Israel will continue to ban most 
travel and exports and restrict the import of 
desperately needed construction materials, the 
new rules are unlikely to restore the territory's 
devastated economy or allow rebuilding of all 
that was destroyed in last year's war [sic]."

In short, Israel's ongoing 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11357.shtml>crime 
against humanity in Gaza continues. As long as 
Israel maintains its military control of Gaza's 
economy, land and sea borders, airspace, 
restricts (or outright denies) the freedom of 
movement of its 1.5 million imprisoned 
inhabitants, and continues murdering Palestinians 
with Apache helicopters, F-15 and F-16 bombers, 
unmanned drones and 
<http://counterpunch.org/cook07132010.html>remote-controlled 
machine guns, Gaza will not be free.

If the 
<http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israel-weighs-responses-to-barrage-of-international-criticism-1.301562>negative 
international attention Israel received after the 
Mavi Marmara massacre led to the so-called 
"<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37442104/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/>easing" 
of the Gaza siege, there's no telling what a 
constant barrage of boats might do. Therefore, 
until this collective punishment of innocent 
civilians ceases completely and Israel is 
<http://www.salon.com/news/israel/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/07/09/israel_gets_away>held 
accountable for its crimes, more boats must 
continue to sail to Gaza. Among those boats 
should be a massive American contingent, funded 
by bold and steadfast believers in 
self-determination, human rights, and 
international law. We have paid for the Israeli 
oppression of Palestine for so long with our tax 
dollars, it's now time to fight for Palestinian 
freedom with our tax-exempt donations.

And so, to all you stars of summer blockbusters 
and sold-out stadiums, start giving generously so 
that a fleet of blockade-busting boats can start their engines.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 27 12:42:59 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:42:59 -0700
Subject: [News] Israel demolishes entire Bedouin village
Message-ID: <mailman.145.1280248988.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Israel demolishes Bedouin village

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/07/2010727133151458970.html
Tuesday, July 27, 2010


Israeli authorities have demolished the homes of about 300 Bedouins 
in a village in the southern Negev desert.

The entire village of al-Arakib was bulldozed on Tuesday, with many 
of the former residents' cattle, trees and belongings lost.

Al-Arakib, which had about 40 homes, is one of 45 Bedouin villages 
not recognised by Israeli authorities.

Haia Noach, director of the Negev Co-existence Forum, was present at 
al-Arakib during the demolition and said that at least five Israeli 
bulldozers arrived around 5:30am (0230GMT).

"It took them about three or four hours to destroy all the houses," 
she said, describing the scene as "appalling."

Scuffles erupted as the villagers and around 150 rights activists 
tried to stop the police from carrying out the demolitions, with 
several people wounded and a handful arrested, activists said.

Speaking from a town near Beersheba, Noach said that many of the 
residents had moved to a nearby graveyard to find shade.

Evacuation notice

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld confirmed the early-morning 
operation, saying the homes had been "illegally built" and were 
destroyed in line with a court ruling issued 11 years ago which was 
never implemented.

"Around 30 shacks were removed and several hundred people were taken 
back to the Rahat area where they originally came from," he said, 
referring to a nearby Bedouin town in Israel's arid south.

He said three people had been detained for questioning but were later 
released without charge.

Noach said Israeli authorities had first given residents of al-Arakib 
a notice to evacaute on June 15, but that no action had followed, so 
the residents began to doubt that the demolition would occur.

But this morning, Israeli police arrived and forced residents to 
leave their homes within minutes, Noach said.

The demolition team destroyed water tanks and removed generators.

"It's like a declaration of war. They don't want you here," Noach 
said. "It's unthinkable."

The residents are now waiting for aid and will probably set up 
makeshift tents and facilities on the scene, Noach said.

According to the 
<http://www.dukium.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=2>Negev 
Co-existence Forum,around half of the 155,000 Bedouins in the Negev - 
all of whom are Israeli citizens - live in villages that are 
unrecognised by the government, without municipal services like water 
and electricity.




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415 863-9977

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From news at freedomarchives.org  Tue Jul 27 12:46:34 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:46:34 -0700
Subject: [News] Gaza children shelled with flechette bombs
Message-ID: <mailman.148.1280249203.5478.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Gaza children shelled with flechette bombs

Adie Mormech writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from 
Palestine, 27 July 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11423.shtml



"She came in through the front door and it wasn't clear she was 
injured. Suddenly a lot of blood came from her nose and she vomited, 
all of the family saw this -- her little brothers were very scared. 
She had just been playing in the front of the house."

That is how Nihed al-Massry describes what happened to her daughter, 
nine-year-old Samah Eid al-Massry, after the Israeli army reportedly 
shelled and fired four bombs into and around a residential area in 
Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, on 21 July. Samah is now being 
hospitalized in serious condition, suffering from extensive blood 
loss and very low haemoglobin. She was hit by shrapnel and flechettes 
from a nail bomb that landed 100 meters away, causing internal 
bleeding to the chest and severe head trauma. Nails are now embedded 
throughout her body.

Shells containing flechettes are illegal under international law if 
fired into densely-populated civilian areas. Three other children 
were wounded in the attack.

Two young men were killed; Muhammad al-Kafarneh, 23, suffered severe 
shrapnel injuries to the back and chest and Kasim al-Shinbary, 19, 
was wounded by nails embedded in his skull and shrapnel his back. It 
was unclear earlier whether they were resistance fighters or if they 
were civilians.

Haitham Thaer Qasem, a four-year-old boy and an only child, was 
asleep on a hospital bed, occasionally gasping for breath through the 
apparatus around his nose. He had suffered deep nasal trauma, and 
flechette darts from the bomb were still embedded in his tiny body, 
through his back, right elbow and right leg. He was 200 meters from 
the impact of the bomb.

Haitham's mother was standing off to the side, quietly crying while 
one of his aunts at his bedside explained what happened.

"We had asked Haitham to get shopping for [his mother] from the 
market, then we heard the bombings and somebody came to our home and 
told our family that he was in the hospital and was injured in the 
bombing. We came quickly to the hospital."

Meanwhile, Samah's doctor explained that the girl's blood loss was a 
major concern. Her injuries are exacerbated by the fact that she, 
like three of her brothers, already suffers from the blood condition 
thalassemia and the drug to treat the condition, Exjade, is scarce 
because of the Israeli blockade. She was clearly in pain and 
confused, trying to remove the nasal tubes. Her mother showed us the 
bandages on her chest.

Her doctor, Muhammad Abu Hassan, described her situation as "semi-critical."

"She was in very bad condition when she arrived -- it's difficult for 
children and very traumatic to insert a chest tube for small children 
-- very painful. Blood was mainly coming from the chest. We will have 
to perform surgery and we will further explore her abdominal pain," 
he explained.

The al-Massry family has been affected by Israeli attacks before. 
Samah's four-year-old brother Ryad was injured during Israel's three 
weeks of attacks on the Gaza Strip during winter 2008-09 when more 
than 400 Palestinian children were killed.

"Our house was hit during the war, a neighbor was killed inside and 
our son suffered severe head injuries. He wasn't cared for and 
because of this his sight is now permanently damaged."

As we left Samah, she had begun to cry, moaning in serious discomfort 
and confusion. There were two more injured children in the hospital 
from the attack, also from the al-Massry family in Beit Hanoun: Azzam 
Muhammad al-Massry, 11, who suffered a severely fractured left elbow 
and Ibrahim Wasseem al-Massry, 4, with light injuries to his abdomen.

The previous week in Gaza, Nema Abu Said, a 33-year-old mother of 
five, was <http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11419.shtml>killed 
by Israeli shelling as she went outside frantically looking for her 
youngest son after a previous round of shelling. Three more family 
members were injured by the flechette shells, many of the darts 
remaining permanently embedded in their bodies.

Adie Mormech is a human rights advocate based in the Gaza Strip who 
was previously abducted by the Israeli navy from the eighth Free Gaza 
Movement boat, the Spirit of Humanity. He volunteers with the 
International Solidarity Movement.



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From news at freedomarchives.org  Wed Jul 28 11:25:47 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:25:47 -0700
Subject: [News] Guam resists expansion of US Colonial Military Bases
Message-ID: <mailman.2.1280330776.12139.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>



US Military Bases on Guam in Global Perspective  1

Catherine Lutz
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Catherine-Lutz/3389


The island of Guam is a most remarkable place of 
cultural distinctiveness and resourcefulness and 
of great physical beauty.  The Chamorro people 
who have lived here for 4000 years also have an 
historical experience with colonialism and 
military occupation more long-lived and 
geographically intensive, acre for acre, than 
anywhere else in the Pacific and perhaps even in 
global comparative scale (Aguon 2006).  It is 
today embroiled in a debate over when, how, or if 
the United States military will acquire more land 
for its purposes and make more intensive use of the island as a whole.

This military expansion has been planned in 
Washington, with acquiescence and funding from 
Tokyo, in order to relocate some 8,000 Marines 
and 9,000 dependents from Okinawa, as well as US 
Navy, Army, and Air Force assets and operations 
to Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern 
Marianas (CNMI) (Erickson and Mikolay 2006).  The 
plans are breathtaking in scope, including 
removal of 71 acres of coral reef from Apra 
Harbor to allow the entry and berthing of nuclear 
aircraft carriers, the acquisition of land 
including the oldest and revered Chamorro village 
on the island at Pagat for a live-fire training 
range, and an estimated 47 percent increase in 
the island?s population, already past its 
water-supply carrying capacity. The military 
expansion is being planned with one-third of the 
island already in military hands and a 
substantial historical legacy of environmental 
contamination and depletion, external political 
control, and other problems brought by the existing military presence.

Pushback has been substantial, something that is 
particularly remarkable in a context in which 
many islanders consider themselves very loyal and 
patriotic Americans and many have military 
paychecks or pensions as soldiers, veterans, or 
contract workers (Diaz 2001).  Dissent among a 
variety of Guam?s social sectors rose 
dramatically with the appearance of a draft 
Environmental Impact Statement in November 2009 
which first made clear how extensive Washington?s 
plans for the island were (Natividad and Kirk 
2010).  It rose, as well, when it became clear 
that Guam?s political leaders and citizens were 
to be simply informed of those plans, rather than 
consulted or asked permission for the various 
uses.  That dissent received support from 
movements against simultaneous US base expansion 
plans in Okinawa and South Korea, as well as from 
the US EPA response to the draft EIS, which found 
it deeply inadequate as a fair and clear 
assessment of the environmental costs of the 
military?s desires.  The Final EIS, just released 
at the end of July, puts the aircraft carrier 
berthing plan on hold and draws out the buildup 
timeline to lower the population growth rate, but 
otherwise retains its scale and scope. A 
<http://www.kuam.com/Global/story.asp?S=12857970>demonstration 
at a sacred site at Pagat on July 23, 2010 
provided the most potent symbolic expression of resistance to the base plan.

My first exposure to Guam was in 1977, when I 
made a very brief stay over on my way to Ifalik 
atoll in the Federated States of Micronesia (then 
still a UN Trust Territory) for ethnographic 
fieldwork that was part of my graduate training 
as an anthropologist.  My miseducation up to that 
point had been profound:  I could come to that 
nation of islands without having first learned ? 
through many years of education in US schools 
?  the hard facts about the colonial status of 
the area to which I was coming.  My 
anthropological training back then focused, as 
most such programs did, on the beauty of 
indigenous ideas and rituals, of kinship systems 
and healing practices.  However helpful attention 
to such things was toward the goal of a humane 
and anti-racist understanding of the world, the 
cultural worlds that anthropology had tried to 
document were treated as if they occurred in a 
vacuum, outside of the influence of powerful 
economic and political forces and outside of history.

My miseducation led me to be surprised when my 
initial permission to travel to Ifalik was 
granted not by Chamorros and Carolinians, but by 
US bureaucrats, then operating as Trust Territory 
officials.  I only then came to realize what this 
all actually meant ? that Ifalik, like Guam, has 
had an deeply colonial history, and that the 
lives the people there have led were in some ways 
of their own creative making and in other ways 
they were the result of choices by people in 
other remote locations, most recently in Tokyo and Washington, DC.

Such is no less true now than it was in 1950 or 
1977.  It is the reason the people of Guam today 
wait to hear exactly how many more acres of their 
land will be taken for military purposes, how 
many tens of thousands of new people and new 
vehicles will be visited on the island, how many 
over flights and aircraft carrier visits, and 
toxic trickles or spills will be visited upon 
them. It is why they wait, not for rent payments 
for the land, but to hear whether there will be 
some US federal dollars allocated to cover some 
percentage of the externalized costs of the 
increased tempo of military operations on the 
island. That is Guam?s colonial history and 
colonial situation.  It is colonial even as many 
of Guam?s residents take their US citizenship 
seriously and want to make claims to full 
citizenship on the foundation of the limited 
citizenship they now have.  It is colonial even 
as Guam?s many military members ? those born on 
Guam and those born in the 50 United States ? can 
and do see themselves as doing their duty to the 
US civilian leadership who deploy them to bases 
here and around the world.  It is colonial even 
as many of Guam?s citizens have been acting in 
the faith that they should be able to make and 
are making their own choices about whether Guam 
becomes even more of a battleship or not.  But 
social science will call it nothing more than 
colonial when a people have not historically 
chosen their most powerful leaders and have been 
told to background their own national identity in 
favor of that of the power which has ultimate 
rule.  The US presence in Guam is properly called 
imperial because the US is an empire in the 
strict sense of the term as used by historians 
and other social analysts of political forms.

Besides colonialism, another concept relevant to 
Guam?s situation is militarization.  It refers to 
an increase in labor and resources allocated to 
military purposes and the shaping of other 
institutions in synchrony with military 
goals.  It involves a shift in societal beliefs 
and values in ways that legitimate the use of 
force (Ferguson 2009).  It helps describe the 
process by which 14 year olds are in uniform and 
carrying proxy rifles in JROTC units in all of 
Guam?s schools, why a fifth to a quarter of high 
school graduates enter the military, and why the 
identity of the island has over time shifted from 
a land of farmers to a land of war survivors to a 
land of loyal Americans to a land that is, 
proudly, ?the Tip of the Spear,? that is, a land 
that is a weapon.  This historical change ? the 
process of militarization or military 
colonization ? has been visible to some, but more often, hidden in plain sight.

US global military basing system

Guam?s military bases are part of the expansive 
US military basing system around the world and on 
the US mainland.  That system is vast in scale 
and impact and has a particular if contentious 
rationale.  It is important to examine what it 
means to live next to military facilities for several reasons:

(1) To study them with the tools of anthropology 
and the perspective of social science allows us 
to question the common sense about them and to see invisible processes.

(2) Like most social phenomena, bases are often 
hidden in plain sight.  They are normalized from 
day to day, but are partially denormalized when 
they grow or shrink.  Even then, much remains 
invisible and accepted as the natural order of things.

(3) Like social phenomena in which power is 
involved, their effects can be systematically 
hidden by advertising, fear, and public relations work.

Military base communities are in many ways as 
distinctive sociologically and anthropologically 
as the military bases they sit next to, because 
they respond in almost every way to the presence 
of those bases.  They are not simply independent 
neighbors, but over time become conjoined, 
although one is always much more powerful than the other.

Officially, as of late 2008 (the last date for 
which the DoD has made such data public) over 
150,000 troops and 95,000 civilian employees are 
massed in 837 US military facilities in 45 
countries and territories, excluding Iraq and 
Afghanistan. There, the US military owns or rents 
720,000 acres of land, and owns, rents or uses 
60,000 buildings and manages structures valued at 
$145 billion. 4742 bases are located in the 
domestic United States. These official numbers 
are quite misleading as to the scale of US 
overseas military basing, however. That is 
because they not only exclude the massive buildup 
of new bases and troop presence in Iraq and 
Afghanistan, but also secret or unacknowledged 
facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places.

Large sums of money are involved in their 
building and operation.  $2 billion in military 
construction money has been expended in only 
three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan 
wars.  Just one facility in Iraq, Balad Air Base, 
houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and 
extends across 16 square miles with an additional 
12 square mile ?security perimeter.?  The Guam 
build-up has been projected to cost between $10 
and $15 billion, with much of that amount in 
contracts going to businesses in the U.S., Japan, 
South Korea, and, less significantly, Guam itself.

These military facilities include sprawling Army 
bases with airfields and McDonalds and schools, 
and small listening posts.  They include 
artillery testing ranges, and berthed aircraft 
carriers. 2  While the bases are literally 
barracks and weapons depots and staging areas for 
war making and ship repair facilities and golf 
courses and basketball courts, they are also 
political claims, spoils of war, arms sales 
showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories 
for cultural (mis)communication, and collections 
of customers for local shops, services, bars, and prostitution.

The environmental, political, and economic impact 
of these bases is enormous. While some people 
benefit from the coming of a base, at least 
temporarily, most communities and many within 
them pay a high price: their farm land taken for 
bases, their bodies attacked by cancers and 
neurological disorders because of military toxic 
exposures, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured 
and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that 
survive on US military and political support 
given as a form of tacit rent for the bases.

The count of US military bases should also 
include the eleven aircraft carriers in the US 
Navy?s fleet, each of which it refers to as ?four 
and a half acres of sovereign US territory.? 
These moveable bases and their land-based 
counterparts are just the most visible part of 
the larger picture of US military presence 
overseas.  This picture of military access 
includes (1) US military training of foreign 
forces, often in conjunction with the provision 
of US weaponry, (2) joint exercises meant to 
enhance US soldiers? exposure to a variety of 
operating environments from jungle to desert to 
urban terrain and interoperability across 
national militaries, and (3) legal arrangements 
made to gain overflight rights and other forms of 
ad hoc use of others? territory as well as to 
preposition military equipment there.  In all of 
these realms, the US is in a class by itself, no 
adversary or ally maintaining anything comparable 
in terms of its scope, depth and global reach.

These three elements come with problems: The 
training programs strengthen the power of 
military forces in relation to other sectors 
within those countries, sometimes with fragile 
democracies. Fully 38 percent of those countries 
with US basing were cited in 2002 for their poor 
human rights record (Lumpe 2002:16). The 
exercises have sometimes been provocative to 
other nations, and in some cases have become the 
pretext for substantial and permanent positioning 
of troops; in recent years, for example, the US 
has run approximately 20 exercises annually on 
Philippine soil.  Recently (July, 2010) announced 
joint US-South Korean military exercises in the 
Yellow Sea, just off the coast of China, have 
produced strong protest from it and arguably will 
lead to increases in its military spending.

The attempt to gain access has also meant 
substantial interference in the affairs of other 
nations: for example, lobbying to change the 
Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, 
respectively, foreign troop basing, US nuclear 
weapons, and a more-than-defensive military in 
the service of US wars, in the case of Japan.  US 
military and civilian officials are joined in 
their efforts by intelligence agents passing as 
businessmen or diplomats; in 2005, the US 
Ambassador to the Philippines created a furor by 
mentioning that the US has 70 agents operating in Mindanao alone.

Given the sensitivity about sovereignty and the 
costs of having the US in their country, 
elaborate bilateral negotiations result in the 
exchange of weapons, cash, and trade privileges 
for overflight and land use rights. Less 
explicitly, but no less importantly, rice import 
levels or immigration rights to the US or 
overlooking human rights abuses have been the 
currency of exchange (Cooley 2008).

Bases are the literal and symbolic anchors, and 
the most visible centerpieces, of the U.S. 
military presence overseas.  To understand where 
those bases are and how they are being used is 
essential for understanding the United States? 
relationship with the rest of the world, the role 
of coercion in it, and its political economic 
complexion.  We can begin by asking why this 
empire of bases was established in the first 
place, how the bases are currently configured 
around the world and how that configuration is changing.

What are bases for?

Foreign military bases have been established 
throughout the history of expanding states and 
warfare. They proliferate where a state has 
imperial ambitions, either through direct control 
of territory or through indirect control over the 
political economy, laws, and foreign policy of 
other places. Whether or not it recognizes itself 
as such, a country can be called an empire when 
it projects substantial power with the aim of 
asserting and maintaining dominance over other 
regions.  Those policies succeed when wealth is 
extracted from peripheral areas, and 
redistributed to the imperial center.  Empires, 
then, have historically been associated with a 
growing gap between the wealth and welfare of the 
powerful center and the regions it dominates. 
Alongside and supporting these goals has often 
been elevated self-regard in the imperial power, 
or a sense of racial, cultural, or social superiority.

The descriptors empire and imperialism have been 
applied to the Romans, Incas, Mongols, Persians, 
Portuguese, Spanish, Ottomans, Dutch, British, 
Germans, Soviets, Chinese, Japanese, and 
Americans, among others. Despite the striking 
differences between each of these cases, each 
used military bases to maintain some forms of 
rule over regions far from their center.  The 
bases eroded the sovereignty of allied states on 
which they were established by treaty; the Roman 
Empire was accomplished not only by conquest, but 
also ?by taking her weaker [but still sovereign] 
neighbors under her wing and protecting them 
against her and their stronger neighbors
 The 
most that Rome asked of them in terms of 
territory was the cessation, here and there, of a 
patch of ground for the plantation of a Roman fortress? (Magdoff et al. 2002).

What have military bases accomplished for these 
empires through history?  Bases are usually 
presented, above all, as having rational, 
strategic purposes; the imperial power claims 
that they provide forward defense for the 
homeland, supply other nations with security, and 
facilitate the control of trade routes and 
resources.  They have been used to protect 
non-economic actors and their agendas as well ? 
missionaries, political operatives, and aid 
workers among them.  Bases have been used to 
control the political and economic life of the 
host nation. Politically, bases serve to 
encourage other governments? endorsement of the 
empire?s military and other foreign policies. 
Corporations and the military itself as an 
organization have a powerful stake in bases? 
continued existence regardless of their strategic value (Johnson 2004).

Alongside their military and economic functions, 
bases have symbolic and psychological 
dimensions.  They are highly visible expressions 
of a nation?s will to status and 
power.  Strategic elites have built bases as a 
visible sign of the nation?s standing, much as 
they have constructed monuments and battleships. 
So, too, contemporary US politicians and the 
public have treated the number of their bases as 
indicators of the nation?s hyperstatus and 
hyperpower.  More darkly, overseas military bases 
can also be seen as symptoms of irrational or 
untethered fears, even paranoia, as they are 
built with the long-term goal of taming a world 
perceived to be out of control.  Empires 
frequently misperceive the world as rife with 
threats and themselves as objects of violent 
hostility from others.  Militaries? interest in 
organizational survival has also contributed to 
the amplification of this fear and imperial 
basing structures as the solution as they ?sell 
themselves? to their populace by exaggerating 
threats, underestimating the costs of basing and 
war itself, as well as understating the obstacles 
facing preemption and belligerence (Van Evera 2001).

As the world economy and its technological 
substructures have changed, so have the roles of 
foreign bases. By 1500, new sailing technologies 
allowed much longer distance voyages, even 
circumnavigational ones, and so empires could 
aspire to long networks of coastal naval bases to 
facilitate the control of sea lanes and trade. 
They were established at distances that would 
allow provisioning the ship, taking on fresh 
fruit that would protect sailors from scurvy, and 
so on.  By the 21st century, technological 
advances have at least theoretically eliminated 
many of the reasons for foreign bases, given the 
possibilities of in transit refueling of jets and 
aircraft carriers, the nuclear powering of 
submarines and battleships, and other advances in 
sea and airlift of military personnel and 
equipment.  Bases have, nevertheless, continued their ineluctable expansion.

States that invest their people?s wealth in 
overseas bases have paid direct as well as 
opportunity costs, whose consequences in the long 
run have usually been collapse of the empire. In 
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, Kennedy notes 
that previous empires which established and 
tenaciously held onto overseas bases inevitably 
saw their wealth and power decay as they chose 
?to devote a large proportion of its total income 
to ?protection,? leaving less for ?productive 
investment,? it is likely to find its economic 
output slowing down, with dire implications for 
its long-term capacity to maintain both its 
citizens? consumption demands and its 
international position? (Kennedy 1987:539).

Nonetheless, U.S. defense officials and scholars 
have continued to argue that bases lead to 
?enhanced national security and successful 
foreign policy? because they provide ?a credible 
capacity to move, employ, and sustain military 
forces abroad,? (Blaker 1990:3) and the ability 
"to impose the will of the United States and its 
coalition partners on any adversaries."  This 
belief helps sustain the US basing structure, 
which far exceeds any the world has seen: this is 
so in terms of its global reach, depth, and cost, 
as well as its impact on geopolitics in all 
regions of the world, particularly the Asia-Pacific.

A short history of US basing

After consolidation of continental dominance, 
there were three periods of expansive global 
ambition in US history beginning in 1898, 1945, 
and 2001. Each is associated with the acquisition 
of significant numbers of new overseas military 
bases. The Spanish-American war resulted in the 
acquisition of a number of colonies, but the US 
basing system was far smaller than that of its 
political and economic peers including many 
European nations as well as Japan.  In the next 
four decades US soldiers were stationed in just 
14 bases, some quite small, in Puerto Rico, Cuba, 
Panama, and the Virgin Islands, but also, 
already, extending across the Pacific to Hawaii, 
Midway, Wake, and Guam, the Philippines, 
Shanghai, two in the Aleutians, American Samoa, 
and Johnston Island (Harkavy 1982). This small 
number was the result in part of a strong 
anti-statist and anti-militarist strain in US 
political culture (Sherry 1995). From the 
perspective of many in the US through the 
inter-war period, to build bases would be to risk 
unwarranted entanglement in others? conflicts.

England had the most during this period, with 
some countries with large militaries and even 
some with expansive ambitions having relatively 
few overseas bases; Germany and the Soviet Union 
had almost none.  But the attempt to acquire such 
bases would be a contributing cause of World War II (Harkavy 1989:5).

 From 14 bases in 1938, by the end of WW II, the 
United States had built or acquired an astounding 
30,000 installations large and small in 
approximately 100 countries. While this number 
contracted significantly, it went on to provide 
the sinews for the rise to global hegemony of the 
United States (Blaker 1990:22).  Certain ideas 
about basing and what it accomplished were to be 
retained from World War II as well, including the 
belief that ?its extensive overseas basing system 
was a legitimate and necessary instrument of U.S. 
power, morally justified and a rightful symbol of 
the U.S. role in the world? (Blaker 1990:28).

Nonetheless, pressure came from Australia, 
France, and England, as well as from Panama, 
Denmark and Iceland, for return of bases in their 
own territory or colonies, and domestically to 
demobilize the twelve million man military (a 
larger military would have been needed to 
maintain the vast basing system). More important 
than the shrinking number of bases, however, was 
the codification of US military access rights 
around the world in a comprehensive set of legal 
documents.  These established security alliances 
with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the 
Middle East and South Asia (CENTO), and Southeast 
Asia (SEATO), and they included bilateral 
arrangements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, 
Australia and New Zealand.  These alliances 
assumed a common security interest between the 
United States and other countries and were the 
charter for US basing in each place.  Status of 
Forces Agreements (SOFAs) were crafted in each 
country to specify what the military could do; 
these usually gave US soldiers broad immunity 
from prosecution for crimes committed and 
environmental damage created.  These agreements 
and subsequent base operations have usually been shrouded in secrecy.

In the United States, the National Security Act 
of 1947, along with a variety of executive 
orders, instituted what can be called a second, 
secret government or the ?national security 
state?, which created the National Security 
Agency, National Security Council, and Central 
Intelligence Agency and gave the US president 
expansive new imperial powers.  From this point 
on, domestic and especially foreign military 
activities and bases were to be heavily masked 
from public oversight (Lens 1987).  Many of those 
unaccountable funds then and now go into use 
overseas, flowing out of US embassies and 
military bases. Including use to interfere in the 
domestic affairs of nations in which it has had 
or desired military access, including attempts to 
influence votes on and change anti-nuclear and 
anti-war provisions in the Constitutions of the 
Pacific nation of Belau and of Japan.

Nonetheless, over the second half of the 20th 
century, the United States was either evicted or 
voluntarily left bases in dozens of countries. 3 
Between 1947 and 1990, the US was asked to leave 
bases in France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, 
Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, 
Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela. 
Popular and political objection to the bases in 
Spain, the Philippines, Greece, and Turkey in the 
1980s enabled those governments to negotiate 
significantly more compensation from the United 
States. Portugal threatened to evict the US from 
important bases in the Azores, unless it ceased 
its support for independence for its African 
colonies, a demand with which the US complied. 4 
In the 1990s and later, the US was sent packing, 
most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, 
Saudi Arabia, Vieques, and Uzbekistan (Simbulan 1985).

At the same time, remarkable numbers of new US 
bases were newly built (241) after 1947 in 
remarkable numbers in the Federal Republic of 
Germany, as well as in Italy, Britain, and Japan 
(Blaker 1990:45).  The defeated Axis powers 
continued to host the most significant numbers of 
US bases: at its height, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations.

As battles become bases, so bases become battles; 
the bases in East Asia acquired in the Spanish 
American War and in World War II, such as Guam, 
Okinawa and the Philippines, became the primary 
sites from which the United States waged war on 
Vietnam.  Without them, the costs and logistical 
obstacles for the US would have been 
immense.  The number of bombing runs over North 
and South Vietnam required tons of bombs to be 
unloaded, for example, at the Naval Station in 
Guam, stored at the Naval Magazine in the 
southern area of the island, and then shipped to 
be loaded onto B-52s at Andersen Air Force Base 
every day during years of the war.  The morale of 
ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it 
was to become through the latter part of the 
1960s, depended on R & R at bases throughout East 
and Southeast Asia which allowed them to leave 
the war zone and be shipped back quickly and 
inexpensively for further fighting (Baker 
2004:76).  In addition to the bases? role in 
fighting these large and overt wars, they 
facilitated the movement of military assets to 
accomplish the over 200 military interventions 
carried out by the US in the course of the Cold War period (Blum 1995).

While speed of deployment is framed as an 
important continued reason for forward basing, 
equally important is that troops could be 
deployed anywhere in the world from US bases 
without having to touch down en route.  In fact, 
US soldiers are being increasingly billeted on US 
territory, including such far-flung areas as 
Guam, which is presently slated for a larger 
buildup for this reason as well as to avoid the 
political and other costs of foreign deployment.

With the will to gain military control of space, 
as well as gather intelligence, the US over time, 
especially in the 1990s, established a large 
number of new military bases to facilitate the 
strategic use of communications and space 
technologies. Military R&D (the Pentagon spent 
over $52 billion in 2005 and employed over 90,000 
scientists) and corporate profits to be made in 
the development and deployment of the resulting 
technologies have been significant factors in the 
growing numbers of technical facilities on 
foreign soil. These include such things as 
missile early-warning radar, signals 
intelligence, space tracking telescopes and laser 
sources, satellite control, downwind air sampling 
monitors, and research facilities for everything 
from weapons testing to meteorology.  Missile 
defense systems and network centric warfare 
increasingly rely on satellite technology and 
drones with associated requirements for ground 
facilities.  These facilities have often been 
established in violation of arms control 
agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty 
meant to limit the militarization of space.

The assumption that US bases served local 
interests in a shared ideological and security 
project dominated into the 1960s: allowing base 
access showed a commitment to fight Communism and 
gratitude for US military assistance. But with 
decolonization and the US war in Vietnam, such 
arguments began to lose their power, and the 
number of US overseas bases declined from an 
early 1960s peak. Where access was once 
automatic, many countries now had increased 
leverage over what the US had to give in exchange 
for basing rights, and those rights could be 
restricted in a variety of important ways, 
including through environmental and other 
regulations. The bargaining chips used by the US 
were increasingly sophisticated weapons, as well 
as rent payments for the land on which bases were 
established. 5  These exchanges were often linked 
with trade and other kinds of agreements, such as 
access to oil and other raw materials and 
investment opportunities (Harkavy 1982:337). They 
also have had destabilizing effects on regional 
arms balances, particularly when advanced 
weaponry is the medium of exchange. From the 
earlier ideological rationale for the bases, 
global post-war recovery and decreasing 
inequality between the US and countries ? mostly 
in the global North ? that housed the majority of 
US bases, led to a more pragmatic or economic 
grounding to basing negotiations, albeit often 
thinly veiled by the language of friendship and 
common ideological bent. The 1980s saw countries 
whose populations and governments had strongly 
opposed US military presence, such as Greece, 
agree to US bases on their soil only because they 
were in need of the cash, and Burma, a neutral 
but very poor state, entered negotiations with 
the US over basing troops there (Harkavy 1989:4-5).

The third period of accelerated imperial ambition 
began in 2000, with the election of George Bush 
and the ascendancy to power of a group of leaders 
committed to a more aggressive and unilateral use 
of military power, their ability to expand the 
scope of US power increased by the attacks of 
9/11. They wanted "a network of 'deployment 
bases' or 'forward operating bases' to increase 
the reach of current and future forces" and 
focused on the need for bases in Iraq. While the 
unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the 
immediate justification, the need for a 
substantial American force presence in the Gulf 
transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam 
Hussein. This plan for expanded US military 
presence around the world has been put into 
action, particularly in the Middle East, the 
Russian perimeter, and, now, Africa.

Pentagon transformation plans result in the 
design of US military bases to operate ever more 
as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which 
to project military capabilities quickly 
anywhere.  Where bases in Korea, for example, 
were once meant primarily to defend South Korea 
from attack from the north, they are now, like 
bases everywhere, project power in many 
directions and serve as stepping stones to 
battles far from themselves.  The Global Defense 
Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, 
focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of 
US bases away from Cold War locations, but on 
grounding imperial ambitions through remaking 
legal arrangements that support expanded military 
activities with other allied countries and 
prepositioning equipment in those countries to be 
able to ?surge? military force quickly, anywhere.

The Department of Defense currently distinguishes 
three types of military facilities. ?Main 
operating bases? are those with permanent 
personnel, strong infrastructure, and often 
including family housing, such as Kadena Air Base 
in Japan and Ramstein Air Force Base in 
Germany.  ?Forward operating sites? are 
?expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a 
limited U.S. military support presence and 
possibly prepositioned equipment,? such as 
Incirlik Air Base in Turkey and Soto Cano Air 
Base in Honduras (US Defense Department 
2004:10).  Finally, ?cooperative security 
locations? are sites with few or no permanent US 
personnel, which are maintained by contractors or 
the host nation for occasional use by the US 
military, and often referred to as ?lily pads.? 
In Thailand, for example, U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy 
Airfield has been used extensively for US combat 
runs over Iraq and Afghanistan. Others are now 
cropping up around the world, especially 
throughout Africa, as in Dakar, Senegal where 
facilities and use rights have been newly established.

Are Guam?s bases domestic or overseas bases? Are 
there racial underpinnings to the differences in how Guam?s basing is handled?

The history just recounted mostly refers to US 
bases on other countries? sovereign soil. Is 
Guam?s situation anomalous?  Is Guam?s Andersen 
AFB a domestic base or a foreign base?  As Guam 
is a US territory, it is neither a fully 
incorporated part of the US nor a free 
nation.  The island?s license plate, which notes 
it is ?Where America?s Day Begins,? also reads, 
?Guam USA.? This expresses the wish of some, 
rather than the reality.  It perhaps would better 
read, Guam, US sort of A.  International legal 
norms make the status clear, however.  Guam is a 
colony, and primarily a military colony, in 
keeping with the idea that the US? imperial 
history, especially in the second half of the 
20th century, has been a military colonialism around the world.

Guam?s status shifts by context, however.  The 
DoDs Base Structure Report places Guam and its 
39,287 ?owned? acres (39 percent of the island?s 
territory) between Georgia (560,799 acres) and 
Hawaii (175,911 acres).  No Status of Forces 
Agreement (SOFA) regulates the US forces on Guam, 
and as far as I know, the DoD does not need to 
report each day to the government of Guam on how 
many soldiers have been brought in or sent out of 
Guam, nor is it negotiating with Guam about its 
plans to grow its bases on Guam.

<http://www.japanfocus.org/data/us_military_bases_on_guam.png>
[]
<http://www.japanfocus.org/data/us_military_bases_on_guam.png>



Map of US military bases on Guam (1991)

One very important and empirical index of the 
degree to which Guam?s bases are foreign or 
domestic is the quality of care that has been 
taken with its environment and health (Castro 
2007).  Overseas bases have repeatedly inflicted 
environmental devastation.  Unexploded ordnance 
killed 21 people in Panama before the US was 
evicted and continues to threaten communities 
nearby.  In Germany, industrial solvents, 
firefighting chemicals, and varieties of waste 
have ruined ecological systems near some US 
bases.  The Koreans are finding extremely high 
levels of military toxins in bases returned to 
them by the US from near the DMZ. Ebeye atoll 
suffers severe water quality and quantity 
problems due to the US military presence (Soroko 2006).

While Guam?s environment has been treated 
carelessly through the years, environmental 
standards have not been high enough for domestic 
US bases either.  Fort Bragg in North Carolina, 
for example, engaged in outdoor burning of very 
large numbers of its unwanted, old wooden 
barracks at one point in the 1970s, and an 
ancient water treatment plant was used on Fort 
Bragg up until quite recently.  One can also 
point to the US Army Corps of Engineers? Formerly 
Used Defense 
<https://environment.usace.army.mil/what_we_do/fuds/>Sites 
whose cleanup would be so expensive that they are 
termed ?national sacrifice zones,? or permanent no man?s lands by some.

But activists have long considered the 
environmental and judicial standards that are 
negotiated into each country?s SOFA as an index 
of how much respect their country is 
accorded.  It is possible to measure the quantity 
of toxins variously introduced into the 
environment of Guam, Germany, the Philippines, 
California, and North Carolina, for example.  The 
broad differences in that quantity roughly occur 
on a scale that appears quite racial, with the US 
mainland at the top, Germany next, and the 
Philippines and Guam at the bottom.  If Guam?s 
political status were truly domestic, we might 
expect Guam to look more like the mainland in 
terms of how the environment has been cared for. It does not.

But the internal racial history of the US itself 
demonstrates that the military base has been a 
booby prize for many of the internally colonized 
in the US as well: the distinction between 
domestic and foreign bases has been blurry on the 
mainland as well.  All domestic military bases 
are in fact, of course, built on Native American 
land, and even after that land was taken, the 
bases were often intentionally sited on land 
inhabited by poor white, black and Indian 
farmers.  Thousands of them lost their land in 
North Carolina alone in the buildup to WW II (Lutz 2001).

And there, too, we can ask, as we ask on Guam, 
who benefited then and who benefits now from base 
building and base buildups?  What costs are 
externalized and borne by others?  And how has a 
rhetoric of national security over all 
contributed to the notion that the military can 
be and should be excepted from environmental protection standards?

The externalized costs of bases

The people of Guam have been engaged in a several 
year exercise of trying to detail the impact of 
military bases in order to gain some relief from 
the expected continuing externalization of the 
physical and social costs of military basing onto 
the people of Guam.  Among the health and 
environmental issues pertaining to base expansion 
are the long term maintenance of roads, the 
stressed and declining water supply, and the likely upswing in crime rates.

In this final section, the economic impact of 
bases is examined, as this has been crucial in 
Guam and elsewhere for the arguments made for 
military expansion.  Obviously the health and 
wellbeing of people affected by military basing 
are crucial, but the economic effects have been 
the primary thing that people in many base 
communities have focused on.  This is so for two 
reasons.  The first is that the military itself 
publicizes its arrival or expansion as an 
economic boon, noting the dollars brought in via 
soldier?s salaries, civilian work on post, and 
construction and other sub-contracts that could 
provide jobs. So the First Hawaiian Bank 
published a Guam Economic Forecast that claimed 
?The military expansion is anticipated to benefit 
Guam?s economy in the amount of $1.5 billion per 
year once the process begins." 6

The second reason for the economic focus is that 
they appear overall to be positive, unlike the 
environmental, sovereignty, cultural, crime, and 
noise effects. But one of the reasons they look 
positive is because the powerful benefit and have 
the resources to convince others that they, too, 
benefit even when they palpably do 
not.  Moreover, the military has large numbers of 
personnel, military and civilian, doing public 
relations work with media and communities to make 
their case for simple economic positives. In 
addition, those locals who are most likely to 
benefit financially have the funding and 
motivation to do similar public relations 
work.  For example, the Chamber of Commerce 
funded a 2008 survey that found that ?71 per cent 
of Guam residents supported an increase in the 
United States military presence, with nearly 80 
per cent of the view that the increasing military 
presence would result in additional jobs and tax 
revenue; according to the poll, 60 per cent felt 
the additional Marines on the island would have a 
positive effect and would ultimately improve the 
island?s quality of life.? 7  This poll was as 
much an attempt to create reality as to reflect 
it. It builds on an existing cultural narrative, 
one that is purchased with media time and power, 
a narrative that says ?you will all benefit.?

What are the economic effects of bases?  Three 
major factors can be identified. First, the 
economic effects are primarily redistributional 
rather than generative (unlike, for example, 
manufacturing or education jobs). Certain sectors 
atrophy and others grow in military districts, 
often in very strong fluctuations. In 2007 in 
Guam, for example, ?While employment in 
manufacturing, transportation and public 
utilities and retail trade decreased, increases 
were seen for jobs in the service sector and 
public sector; with the construction sector 
experiencing the largest increase, that is, 1,450 
jobs, or 35 per cent.? 8  Usually, retail jobs 
are the main type of work created around military 
bases. Unfortunately, those jobs pay less than 
any other category of work, accelerating the 
growth of inequality in military communities.

Second, the military is a highly toxic industrial 
operation and it externalizes many of its costs 
of operation to the communities that host it and 
serve it. These costs include such things as 
environmental waste, PTSD in returning war 
veterans and high rates of domestic violence, 
rapid deterioration of roads and other public 
amenities, and, in many communities, decline in 
human capital development of populations that 
have gone into the military (Lutz and Bartlett 
1995, Lutz 2001). JROTC, for example, only 
appears to add resources to school districts 
while it in fact draws on significant local 
education resources, while serving as recruiting 
devices. The math on these costs ? the 
subtraction from the general welfare and general public funds ? is rarely done.

Finally, military economies are volatile.  While 
the ?war cycle? is different than the business 
cycle, it also has booms and busts.  For example, 
businesses in military personnel cities like 
Fayetteville, North Carolina regularly go under 
when service members are deployed to US war 
zones.  Any major deployment from Guam?s bases 
can be expected to significantly harm local 
enterprise dependent on military 
business.  Moreover, a volatile real estate 
market catering to foreign military personnel 
sends property prices spiralling and forces local 
working families into more substandard housing.

Conclusion

There are legal questions in the Guam military 
buildup as well. In her testimony before the UN 
Committee of 24 in 2008, Sabina Flores Peres 
referred to the extremity of ?the level and 
grossness of the infraction? of the UN Charter by 
the US in its further militarization of the 
island. This is not hyperbole, because Guam?s 
militarization is objectively more extreme in its 
concentration than that found virtually anywhere 
else on earth.  There are only a few other areas 
that are in similar condition ? all, not 
coincidentally islands such as Okinawa, Diego 
Garcia, and, in the past, Vieques, Puerto Rico 
(see e.g., Inoue 2004, Yoshida 2010 and McCaffrey 
2002).  This was the product of an island 
strategy for the US Navy, developed in the face 
of decolonization and anxieties about the fate of 
continental US bases in that context in the 1950s and 1960s (Vine 2009).

Guam, objectively, has the highest ratio of US 
military spending and military hardware and land 
takings from indigenous populations of any place 
on earth.  Here there might have been rivals in 
Diego Garcia or in some areas of the continental 
US if the US had not forcibly removed those 
indigenous landowners altogether or onto the 
equivalent of reservations, something the US had 
hoped to do in Guam as far back as 1945.  The 
level and grossness of the infraction has to do 
with the racial hierarchy that fundamentally 
guides the US in its ?negotiations? with other 
peoples over the siting of its military bases and 
the treatment they are accorded once the US 
settles in.  As the military budget suddenly and 
intensely comes under scrutiny in the United 
States in the summer of 2010 during severe 
economic crisis, the hope must be that the 
project of building yet more military facilities 
on Guam will hit the chopping block.  As a human 
rights issue, however, the US treatment of Guam?s 
people should have no price tag.



Catherine Lutz is the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Family 
Professor in Anthropology and International 
Studies at the Watson Institute for International 
Studies at Brown University.  She is the author 
of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0814752446/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20>The 
Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. 
Military Posts and (with elin o?Hara slavick, 
Carol Mayvor and Howard Zinn), 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/8881586339/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20>Bomb 
after Bomb: A Violent Cartography.

Recommended citation: Catherine Lutz, "US 
Military Bases on Guam in Global Perspective," 
The Asia-Pacific Journal, 30-3-10, July 26, 2010.

References

Aguon, Julian. (2006) The Fire This Time: Essays 
on Life Under U.S. Occupation. (Tokyo: Blue Ocean Press).

Baker, Anni (2004) American Soldiers Overseas: 
The Global Military Presence (Westport, CT: Praeger).

Blaker, James R. (1990) United States Overseas 
Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger).

Blum, William (1995) Killing Hope: U.S. Military 
and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press).

Castro, Fanai (2007) Health Hazards: Guam. In 
Outposts of Empire, Sarah Irving, Wilbert van der 
Zeijden, and Oscar Reyes, eds. (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute).

Cooley, Alexander. Base Politics: Democratic 
Change and the U.S. Military Overseas. Ithaca, 
NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Department of Defense Base Structure Report 
Fiscal Year 2009 Baseline (A Summary of DOD?s 
Real Property Inventory). 
<http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/2009baseline.pdf>Link.

Diaz, Vicente (2001) Deliberating Liberation Day: 
Memory, Culture and History in Guam. In Perilous 
Memories: the Asia Pacific War(s). Takashi 
Fujitani, Geoff White and Lisa Yoneyami, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press).

Erickson, Andrew S. and Mikolay, Justin D. (2006) 
A Place and a Base: Guam and the American 
Presence in East Asia. In Reposturing the Force: 
U.S. Overseas Presence in the 21st Century. 
Carnes Lord, ed. (Newport: Naval War College).

Harkavy, Robert E. (1982) Great Power Competition 
for Overseas Bases: The Geopolitics of Access 
Diplomacy (New York: Pergamon Press).

------ (1989) Bases Abroad: The Global Foreign 
Military Presence (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Inoue, Masamichi S. (2004) ??We Are Okinawans But 
of a Different Kind": New/Old Social Movements 
and the U.S. Military in Okinawa,? Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, No. 1.

Johnson, Chalmers (2004) The Sorrows of Empire: 
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan).

Kennedy, Paul M. (1987) The Rise and Fall of 
Great Powers: Economic Change and Military 
Conflict from 1500-2000 (New York: Random House).

Lens, Sidney (1987) Permanent War: The 
Militarization of America (New York: Schocken).

Lumpe, Lora (2002) U.S. Foreign Military 
Training: Global Reach, Global Power, and 
Oversight Issues. Foreign Policy in Focus Special Report, May.

Lutz, Catherine (2001) Homefront: A Military City 
and the American 20th Century (Boston: Beacon Press).

Lutz, Catherine and Lesley Bartlett (1995) Making 
Soldiers in the Public Schools: An Analysis of 
the Army JROTC Curriculum. (Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee).

Magdoff, Harry, Foster, John Bellamy, McChesney, 
Robert W. and Sweezy, Paul (2002) U.S. Military 
Bases and Empire, The Monthly Review Vol. 53, No. 10.

McCaffrey, Katherine (2002) Military Power and 
Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto 
Rico (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press).

Natividad, LisaLinda and Gwyn Kirk (2010) 
?Fortress Guam: Resistance to US Military 
Mega-Buildup,? The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 10, 
2010, <http://japanfocus.org/-LisaLinda-Natividad/3356/>link.

Sherry, Michael S. (1995) In the Shadow of War: 
The United States Since the 1930?s (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Simbulan, Roland (1985) The Bases of our 
Insecurity: A Study of the U.S. Military Bases in 
the Philippines (Manila, Philippines: BALAI Fellowship).

Soroko, Jennifer (2006) ?Water at the 
intersection of militarization, development, and 
democracy on Kwajalein Atoll, in the Republic of 
the Marshall Islands?. MA thesis, Department of Anthropology, Brown University.

US Defense Department (2004) Strengthening U.S. 
Global Defense Posture, Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.).

Van Evera, Stephen (2001) Militarism (Cambridge, 
MA: MIT). Available [online] 
<http://web.mit.edu/polisci/research/vanevera/militarism.pdf>here. 
Date last accessed July 23, 2010.

Vine, David. (2009) Island of Shame: The Secret 
History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego 
Garcia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yoshida, Kensei (2010) Okinawa and Guam: In the 
Shadow of U.S. and Japanese ?Global Defense 
Posture,? The Asia-Pacific Journal, 
<http://japanfocus.org/-Yoshida-Kensei/3378>link.

Endnotes

1 This paper is an updated and revised version of 
an invited Presidential Lecture given at the 
University of Guam on April 14, 2009.  Portions 
appeared in the Introduction to The Bases of 
Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military 
Posts. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

2 The major concentrations of U.S. sites outside 
those war zones as of 2007 were in South Korea, 
with 106 sites and 29,000 troops, Japan with 130 
sites and 49,000 troops, most concentrated in 
Okinawa, and Germany with 287 sites and 64,000 
troops.  Guam with 28 facilities has nearly 6,600 
airmen and soldiers and is slated to radically 
expand over the next several years (Base Structure Report FY2007).

3 Between 1947 and 1988, the U.S. left 62 
countries, 40 of them outside the Pacific Islands (Blaker 1990:34).

4 Luis Nuno Rodrigues, ?Trading ?Human Rights? 
for ?Base Rights?: Kennedy, Africa and the 
Azores?, Ms. Possession of the author, March 2006.

5 Harkavy (1982:337) calls this the 
?arms-transfer-basing nexus? and sees the U.S. 
weaponry as having been key to maintaining both 
basing access and control over the client states 
in which the bases are located.  Granting basing 
rights is not the only way to acquire advanced 
weaponry, however.  Many countries purchased arms 
from both superpowers during the Cold War, and 
they are less likely to have US bases on their soil.

6 Economic Forecast ? Guam Edition 2006-2007, First Hawaiian Bank, pp. 8-9.

7 <http://www.guampdn.com>Link, 18 February 2008.

8 <http://www.guamdol.net>Link, September 2007, Current Employment Report.




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From news at freedomarchives.org  Fri Jul 30 10:54:23 2010
From: news at freedomarchives.org (Anti-Imperialist News)
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:54:23 -0700
Subject: [News] Farc slams Colombian government
Message-ID: <mailman.31.1280501870.12139.news_freedomarchives.org@freedomarchives.org>

Farc slams Colombian government

Friday, July 30, 2010
17:41 Mecca time, 14:41 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/07/20107305313279872.html

Al Jazeera obtained video of Alfonso Cano, the Farc chief, delivering 
a message to Colombia's government

The leader of Colombia's largest rebel group has been seen in a new 
video, criticising the Latin American country's president-elect.

In the video obtained by Al Jazeera, Alfonso Cano, the 
<http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/05/2008615165816702835.html>Revolutionary 
Armed Forces of Colombia(Farc) leader, is shown to be discussing the 
recent presidential elections and government's policies.

"The triumph of [Juan Manuel] Santos on June 20 guarantees the 
continuation of his policies and strategies," Cano, whose real name 
is 
<http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/05/20086150851467563.html>Guillermo 
Saenz Vargas,says in the video dated July 2010.

"He [Santos] has shielded the former government from being taken to 
national or international justice."

Santos, the former defence 
minister,<http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/06/2010620213922101559.html> 
won Colombia's run-offpresidential election last month.

He promised to continue the policies of Alvaro Uribe, the outgoing 
president, who was unable to run for re-election after a 
constitutional court barred him from seeking a third term.

Crucial juncture

Al Jazeera's Teresa Bo said that the release of the video, the 
authenticity of which could not be verified, came at a crucial time 
for the country.

"This is happening only days before the elected president of 
Colombia, Juan Manos Santos, who will succeed president Alvaro Uribe, 
takes office. This is no coincidence," our correspondent said.

"He is also sending a message to Juan Manuel Santos about the future 
and what he should do."

In the video, Cano also said that the new president has merely 
undertaken a task "of rearranging a political regime".

"[This government] is filled with illegitimacy because it has been 
taken over by drug trafficking, by administrative corruption, and impunity."

"The whole electoral apparatus is rotten. It is characterised by 
terrorist violence in a substantial way."

Popular figure

Uribe's two four-year terms in office were marred by scandals over 
corruption and human rights abuses, including arrests of legislators 
for "colluding with death squads" and a probe into state spies 
illegally wiretapping journalists and judges.

But he remains popular for battling the Farc fighters, using billions 
of dollars in US aid to push them away from Colombia's main cities.

The Farc fighters have said that they will keep up their fight 
against the government.

"People can vote for whom the want, but we will continue fighting," 
Commander Duber of Farc told Al Jazeera on the eve of the election.

"The ideology of the Farc is to win or die, that's what Che Guevara said."




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